Rae Vann, Head of Employment Law and Labor Relations, Wayfair | Speaker

Rae Vann is Head of Employment Law and Labor Relations for Wayfair. She and her team are responsible for guiding and counseling cross-functional Talent teams and business leaders on ensuring compliance with a wide range of labor and employment laws and requirements, supporting and executing practical strategies for proactively preventing and mitigating legal risk, and responding to, and coordinating the defense of,  employee disputes and contested proceedings.

Prior to joining Wayfair in January 2022, Rae spent more than two decades in private practice, where she represented and advised corporate clients on a variety of workplace compliance and DEI matters. She previously served as the senior vice president and general counsel of the Center for Workplace Compliance (formerly the Equal Employment Advisory Council (EEAC)). There, she advocated for the development of sound workplace policy in the courts and before federal regulatory agencies, including authoring numerous amicus curiae briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals. Rae also authored comments and testified before the U.S. Congress and the EEOC on a range of equal employment opportunity and workplace compliance matters.

Having begun her career in enforcement, Rae is well-versed in recognizing and mitigating individual and systemic discrimination risks, establishing effective alternative dispute resolution procedures, conducting thorough and effective workplace harassment and other misconduct investigations, and other labor and employment matters. As a member of the EEOC’s Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, Rae helped guide development of a detailed set of recommendations to help employers prevent workplace harassment. The recommendations were released in June 2016, ahead of the international #MeToo movement.

Rae is a nationally recognized speaker and author on labor and employment issues. Her thought leadership has been featured in media including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Law, Law360, National Law Journal, National Public Radio, PBS NewsHour, Politico, and Reuters. She is a Faculty member for the Institute for Workplace Equality and is on the Board of Directors for the American Employment Law Council (AELC), the nation’s premier, invitation-only organization of high level labor and employment attorneys practicing on the management side.