Mary Jo O’Neill is the Regional Attorney for the Phoenix District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission which includes Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. She currently manages a legal staff of 25 employees, litigates employment discrimination cases in federal court in the five states she has responsibility for, advises her enforcement colleagues, and is a frequent trainer/speaker for the EEOC, bar associations, employer groups, and community organizations.
Ms. O’Neill graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from the University of Arizona with a B.A. in political science and women’s studies in 1976. Following graduation cum laude from the University of Arizona law school in 1979, she clerked for an appellate judge for a year and then represented indigent Native Americans individually and in groups at the Urban Indian Law Project, first as a Reginald Heber Fellow. She is a past chair of the labor section of the Arizona State Bar Association. In 1986, Ms. O’Neill began her work at the EEOC as a trial attorney, then as a supervisory trial attorney, until she was selected as the Regional Attorney in 2002. While at the EEOC, she has been lead counsel on jury trials and has negotiated nationwide settlements, including the global settlement of the EEOC’s cases filed against Wal-Mart under the Americans with Disabilities Act.