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Joseph Huprich is a California employment attorney based in Ontario, CA. He represents employees across the Inland Empire and greater Los Angeles, and his cases focus on wrongful termination and retaliation, though harassment and wage disputes come through his door just as often. He represents workers only, not companies.
For several years, Joseph defended employers, first at a national litigation firm and later at an Am Law 100 firm that focused on employment defense. He worked on high-exposure claims and saw how companies decide what a case is worth, when to fight it, and when to settle. That experience didn’t disappear when he switched sides. He still analyzes potential defenses like the other side’s lawyer before he files a claim.
Reading about how a defense firm operates is one thing. Sitting inside that process for years is another. Joseph spent those years digging through internal investigations and sitting in on strategy calls where employers tried to figure out how exposed they actually were. It’s where he picked up a sense for which legal arguments hold up once a case gets to court, and which ones only sound good in an internal memo.
He brings that same eye to employee cases now. A deposition looks different to a lawyer who has sat across the table from someone doing exactly what he’s now doing to them. Most cases are prepared as if they’re headed to trial, even when they end up settling, because that preparation is usually what gets a better settlement in the first place.
University of San Diego School of Law
Juris Doctor
University of Southern California
Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations
Supreme Court of California
Federal District Courts:
Central District of California
Eastern District of California
Southern District of California
Northern District of California
Federal Courts of Appeals:
Ninth Circuit
Fifth Circuit
California Employment Lawyers Association
California Lawyers Association
San Bernardino County Bar Association
Los Angeles County Bar Association (past member)
Rising Star, SuperLawyers®
Top Attorneys, Pasadena Magazine
Pro Bono Hero Award
Joseph is originally from the Midwest. He served in the military during the Gulf War, then went on to study International Relations at the University of Southern California before heading to the University of San Diego School of Law for his Juris Doctor.
Joseph is admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of California, along with the following federal courts:
Employment cases don’t always stay in one court system. A claim built around FEHA can end up alongside a federal claim under Title VII or the ADA, and having both state and federal admissions means that shift doesn’t require bringing in a second lawyer.
He belongs to the California Employment Lawyers Association, the California Lawyers Association, the San Bernardino County Bar Association, and formerly the Los Angeles County Bar Association.
In his early career, he was picked by SuperLawyers as a Rising Star®. And recently Pasadena Magazine named him one of its Top Attorneys. Furthermore, Joseph has also picked up a Pro Bono Hero Award along the way for volunteer work he regularly does.
Twenty-five years, offices in two counties, and a stack of admissions like that add up to what people usually mean when they call him an experienced employment lawyer in California, though Joseph tends to talk less about the resume and more about the case in front of him.
Joseph’s clients have included executives negotiating their exit, healthcare workers facing retaliation, salespeople owed unpaid commissions, managers pushed out after complaining about something illegal, and hourly workers who never got paid for the hours they actually worked. Employment law doesn’t sort neatly by job title, and neither does his caseload.
An executive with a six-figure severance package and a warehouse worker owed three weeks of unpaid overtime are dealing with very different dollar amounts. But the underlying questions aren’t that different: was this handled lawfully, and what does the employee actually walk away with? Joseph starts both the same way, by working out what actually happened before worrying about what to do about it.
That usually means pulling personnel records and internal communications first, then company policy, then whatever witnesses are willing to talk.. From there, Joseph works out what the California Fair Employment and Housing Act and the Labor Code actually support, what the likely defenses will be, and what the client is trying to get out of the case — money, an apology, or just a clean exit.
Not every case follows the same path after that. Some get resolved with a demand letter or a severance negotiation. Some go to the California Civil Rights Department or the EEOC first. Some end up in court, or in arbitration if the employment agreement requires it. Joseph tries to have a sense of where a case is likely headed before the first letter goes out, not after.
Employment law in California shifts constantly, through new legislation and appellate rulings that reinterpret existing statutes. A general practice attorney has to relearn the current state of the law every time a new employment case walks in the door. Joseph doesn’t, because employment law is the only thing he practices.
Wrongful termination and discrimination make up a good chunk of it, along with harassment, retaliation, and wage disputes — the cases most people think of first. But disability accommodation requests, whistleblower retaliation, and FMLA violations land on his desk just as often, and so do executive compensation disputes, severance negotiations, and the occasional arbitration matter when an employment contract requires it.
A lot of these overlap in a single case. An employee who reports something illegal and gets fired two weeks later isn’t dealing with one problem — that’s a wage or safety issue and a retaliation claim happening at the same time, and treating them separately usually weakens both.
Joseph’s defense-side background matters here too. Employers respond differently to a case with two or three overlapping claims than they do to a single complaint, and spotting that early changes how the case gets built from the start. It also affects negotiation. An employer weighing the cost of defending three separate claims against one settlement usually moves faster than one facing a single, isolated complaint it thinks it can beat.
The firm’s Ontario office is at 980 W. 6th Street, Suite 320, serving the Inland Empire broadly — Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, Claremont, Montclair, La Verne, Pomona, Chino, Chino Hills, Fontana, and Jurupa Valley. Given how much warehousing and logistics work runs through this part of California, a good number of the cases here involve that industry specifically. Local familiarity is part of what clients expect from an Ontario, CA employment lawyer, and Joseph appears regularly in San Bernardino County Superior Court.
Pasadena is the firm’s second office, at 1055 E. Colorado Blvd., Suite 500, covering Glendale, Burbank, Arcadia, Monrovia, and the rest of the San Gabriel Valley. Cases from this side of the practice usually run through the Los Angeles County Superior Court system instead.
The law itself doesn’t change between the two offices. FEHA and the Labor Code apply the same way in Ontario as they do in Pasadena. What changes is which courthouse a case lands in and which local industries tend to generate which kinds of disputes.
Clients pick Joseph because they’ll be working with him directly, not a rotating set of junior associates. He founded Huprich Law Firm, a California employment law firm built around one idea: the attorney who takes your call should be the one who tries your case.
Losing a job or dealing with harassment isn’t abstract for the person going through it. Joseph tries to give clients a straight answer about what the law can and can’t do for them, rather than vague reassurance that everything will work out.
Keeping the practice small also means Joseph is the one reading the documents and building the case,
not summarizing someone else’s work. Clients dealing with Huprich Law Firm are mostly dealing with Joseph, start to finish.
Joseph plays tennis and spends time with family in Los Cabos when he’s not working. He divides his time between the Ontario and Pasadena offices to be near both sides of the practice and close enough to really know the courthouses, the local bar associations, and the businesses influencing the cases coming out of every region.
Legal Disclaimer: The information on this website is provided in a general nature for your information and is not legal advice. Neither reading this page nor contacting the law firm creates an attorney-client relationship. If you need legal advice about a particular employment situation in California, consult with an attorney.