When it comes to work-life balance, some firms do a good job of recognizing that their employees are also people. DLA Piper came under fire for slashing their parental leave by six weeks last year — shows you where they stand on that. The year before, the firm was sued by Anisha Mehta. She claimed that the firm fired her, a seventh-year associate, for requesting to take maternity leave — they showed her the door six days after she made her request. She’s still going toe-to-toe with the firm over the firing, and the case is heading to trial. Reuters has coverage:
U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres said that Anisha Mehta, a former senior associate in the firm’s intellectual property group in San Francisco and New York, “presented evidence that could reasonably cast doubt on DLA’s purported reason for firing her.”
It is worth remembering that when DLA Piper claimed that they fired her over “a series of increasingly catastrophic blunders,” they pointed to typos that were caught before the documents left the firm and the rather subjective “sloppy work product.” As silly as it would be to fire someone for those reasons, it is only fair game if the justification isn’t actually a pretext for firing someone over something you can’t fire them for. After seeing the evidence, the presiding judge has some doubts:
[Judge Torres] … said DLA Piper’s performance-based rationale for firing Mehta is “at best, in tension with other evidence in the record or, at worst, plainly contradicted by it,” citing raises and bonuses she earned during her time at the firm, as well as Mehta’s work with an important client.
Really bad business move to put someone you think has sloppy work product on an important client’s matter. A jury will ultimately decide if DLA Piper was cutting their losses after making a poor personnel assignment on a high-value case or cut a valued employee who was with them for nearly a decade because she was going to give birth. Not really sure which outcome is better for the firm’s reputation.
Law Firm DLA Piper Must Face Lawsuit Over Pregnancy Bias, Judge Rules [Reuters]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
The post DLA Piper Sued Over Alleged Pregnancy Bias appeared first on Above the Law.
When it comes to work-life balance, some firms do a good job of recognizing that their employees are also people. DLA Piper came under fire for slashing their parental leave by six weeks last year — shows you where they stand on that. The year before, the firm was sued by Anisha Mehta. She claimed that the firm fired her, a seventh-year associate, for requesting to take maternity leave — they showed her the door six days after she made her request. She’s still going toe-to-toe with the firm over the firing, and the case is heading to trial. Reuters has coverage:
U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres said that Anisha Mehta, a former senior associate in the firm’s intellectual property group in San Francisco and New York, “presented evidence that could reasonably cast doubt on DLA’s purported reason for firing her.”
It is worth remembering that when DLA Piper claimed that they fired her over “a series of increasingly catastrophic blunders,” they pointed to typos that were caught before the documents left the firm and the rather subjective “sloppy work product.” As silly as it would be to fire someone for those reasons, it is only fair game if the justification isn’t actually a pretext for firing someone over something you can’t fire them for. After seeing the evidence, the presiding judge has some doubts:
[Judge Torres] … said DLA Piper’s performance-based rationale for firing Mehta is “at best, in tension with other evidence in the record or, at worst, plainly contradicted by it,” citing raises and bonuses she earned during her time at the firm, as well as Mehta’s work with an important client.
Really bad business move to put someone you think has sloppy work product on an important client’s matter. A jury will ultimately decide if DLA Piper was cutting their losses after making a poor personnel assignment on a high-value case or cut a valued employee who was with them for nearly a decade because she was going to give birth. Not really sure which outcome is better for the firm’s reputation.
Law Firm DLA Piper Must Face Lawsuit Over Pregnancy Bias, Judge Rules [Reuters]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
The post DLA Piper Sued Over Alleged Pregnancy Bias appeared first on Above the Law.
