Cathe L. Caraway-Howard

Cathe L. Caraway-Howard has practiced employment law in California since 1989, primarily representing employees all over the state.  A partner at Bander Law Firm, LLP since 2004, Ms. Caraway-Howard's practice emphasizes wage and hour, wrongful termination, discrimination, invasion of privacy, trade secrets protection, and class action litigation. She has recovered millions for her clients in back and future wages, and helped many employees negotiate the shark-infested waters of employment rights.

Ms. Caraway-Howard received her degree in Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the University of California at Davis in 1989. Ms. Caraway-Howard worked as a paralegal in an immigration law firm, which experience led her to law school. Ms. Caraway-Howard obtained her Juris Doctorate from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and received honors for her academic performance.  Her first job out of law school was as an associate with Gordon, Edelstein, Krepack, Grant, Felton & Goldstein in Los Angeles where she litigated any employment case she could while handling a personal injury caseload.  In 1993, with the birth of her daughter, Ms. Caraway-Howard continued to serve the clients of Gordon, Edelstein et al. as “Of Counsel.”  Motherhood only slowed Ms. Caraway-Howard down slightly, enough to enable taking a year to work as a preschool teacher when her daughter was a toddler.  She returned to full-time practice when her daughter entered kindergarten.  From that point on, her practice focused almost exclusively on workers' rights.

In 1997, Ms. Caraway-Howard teamed up with Joel Bander, founder of Bander Law Firm, LLP.  As Of Counsel to BLF, Ms. Caraway-Howard and Mr. Bander found symbiosis and worked on many employment cases. An early outstanding result they won was a $500,000 award in a commission case that included punitive damages. The list of successes is long after eleven years. Most recently, Ms. Caraway-Howard has handled wage and hour class actions, including settlements of $800,000.00, $300,000.00, $175,000.00 for employees of several different restaurant chains in Los Angeles County.

In 2006, Mr. Bander and Ms. Caraway-Howard launched a separate venture called Advance Litigation Service (ALS), which provides damage calculation services to wage and hour attorneys.  The damage calculation service grew out of the spreadsheet analysis developed by Ms. Caraway-Howard in her wage and hour cases. 

Ms. Caraway-Howard is a member of the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (CAALA) and California Employment Lawyers Association (CELA). In addition, Ms. Caraway-Howard is a Past President of Executive Le Tip of West Los Angeles where she remains an active member.