As Perkins Coie and Ashurst advance toward their upcoming merger, it provides both firms an opportunity to reflect on their own calcified practices and embrace change where needed. Like, for example, how the new firm might handle a hypothetical situation where a female associate is subjected to sexual rumors spread by partners. The sort of situation where the woman receives emails from her supervising partner’s husband with subject lines like “Greetings, sad people,” that begin “I don’t know which of you two nitwits is more to blame….”
Unfortunately, this isn’t as hypothetical as one would hope.
On LinkedIn, Perkins Coie counsel Breanna Philips expressed her hope that the merger between her firm and Ashurst will bring some soul-searching and tangible change in managing hostile work environments.
Per Philips’s own account, here is the rough timeline. In September 2025, a female partner who was Philips’s direct supervisor allegedly started a rumor that Philips had been sexually assaulted by a male partner in another group. That rumor resulted, Philips says, in a closed-door meeting — “held without notice,” per the email Philips sent firm leadership in January — in which the male partner in question asked Philips about her sexual history.
There is approximately no version of HR training that recommends that response.
Philips reported both the rumor and the closed-door meeting to HR. “I was concerned that request might not be taken seriously, so I escalated to a more senior HR representative a few days later,” Philips writes. “And a third HR representative joined shortly after to lead the investigation.” Despite this, Philips just waited.
A month later, in October, the husband of the supervising partner — who was himself a former Perkins partner — sent the aforementioned “greetings, sad people” email to Philips’s work account.
Quick housekeeping: the firm has noted that all the partners involved have left, though Philips’s account makes clear that the female partner accused of starting the rumors was still her supervisor when this happened, and Bloomberg reports the female partner left “of her own accord due to an unrelated reason.”
The email itself — you can read it in full (with names redacted) — accuses Philips and another Perkins lawyer of spreading the rumor that the husband was “having, or interested in having, an affair.” The partner’s husband insists that an affair with him would be “about as plausible as my being one of the people who robbed the Louvre,” which is a bizarre tonal shift in such a confrontational email. He then suggests Philips and her colleague are “needy, gossipy vampires” who “suck the life out of” his wife. He recommends that Philips read David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” — perhaps the most stuck-in-the-90s-Pacific-Northwest advice ever — and “stop emulating it.”
The male senior lawyer also expresses his hope that the email humiliates the junior female lawyer — “If receiving this is humiliating or embarrassing for you, if it makes you scared or feel shame, that’s good. It should.” — and signs off “Sincerely (more sincere than you can possibly imagine).”
Where did this rumor come from? According to the Philips account:
I called the sender and the female partner immediately. He told me that during a marital spat, she accused him of having an affair—an idea she later tried to blame on another associate, also copied on the email. When he asked her who the affair was supposedly with, she named me.
As she explains “my direct supervisor had now sexualized me two times (first the assault rumor, second, the affair lie),” which seems to be an accurate characterization of those alleged facts. This is why firms have HR departments. Philips claims HR told her to “do nothing” and she took that as an indication that it was being handled by personnel. Apparently, it wasn’t.
By January, Philips had had enough and sent a January 21 email to HR, employment counsel, and several firm leaders. The email listed seven specific items she expected the firm to address, including the September rumor, the closed-door meeting in which a partner asked her about her sexual history, and “the firm’s decision to let [the husband partner] attend the Christmas party this year, despite knowing of his harassing messages.” She requested a written response by January 28, but also WAIT, THEY LET THE GUY GO TO THE HOLIDAY PARTY! That seems… problematic.
According to Philips, only after this email did the firm tell her a third-party investigator would be retained, and the outside investigator first contacted her on February 27 — roughly five months after she first reported the rumor.
Perkins Coie provided a statement to Bloomberg:
“Perkins Coie has long sought to foster an inclusive workplace that values a broad array of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences,” the firm said Thursday. “When an employee raises a concern with HR, it is fully investigated, including in some cases by a third party, and appropriate action taken.”
Sort of glosses over the five-month lag.
And that’s the assessment Philips makes in another LinkedIn post, noting her “concern is not whether outside investigators are ever used; it is that a prompt, neutral investigation did not happen here. That distinction matters.” It does.
Honestly, if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Philips still works at Perkins Coie and was, in fact, promoted to counsel in January. That should not be remarkable, but unfortunately, corporate America is littered with stories of junior female employees getting tagged with some sort of previously undisclosed “performance issue” and nudged out the door as companies move to shield managers. The response described in these posts is unacceptable, but it could have been much worse.
The tie-up with Ashurst will produce a roughly $2.8 billion, 3,000-lawyer transatlantic operation. “Seem reasonable to require accountability amongst partners and HR personnel?” as Philips puts it to Ashurst. “Certainly seems to be less monetary exposure in doing so.”
As for suggestions, she writes:
At a minimum, these questions should be asked: 1. Is there an internal SOP for investigating complaints, and will the firm commit to making a copy available? 2. What disciplinary action exists for misconduct, and is application discretionary or structured? 3. Will the firm commit to supplying partners with demographic data for recent firings?
She addressed these to her own future firm, but these should be questions every law firm takes a second to make sure they know how to answer. Because law firms are a lot closer to hosting a hostile work environment than they think.
Perkins Coie Hires Investigator for Counsel’s Harassment Claims [Bloomberg Law News]
Earlier: The Next Transatlantic Biglaw Heavyweight: Ashurst Ties The Knot With Perkins Coie
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post Biglaw Harassment Account Includes Maybe The Most Insane Email A Biglaw Partner Has Ever Sent An Associate appeared first on Above the Law.
As Perkins Coie and Ashurst advance toward their upcoming merger, it provides both firms an opportunity to reflect on their own calcified practices and embrace change where needed. Like, for example, how the new firm might handle a hypothetical situation where a female associate is subjected to sexual rumors spread by partners. The sort of situation where the woman receives emails from her supervising partner’s husband with subject lines like “Greetings, sad people,” that begin “I don’t know which of you two nitwits is more to blame….”
Unfortunately, this isn’t as hypothetical as one would hope.
On LinkedIn, Perkins Coie counsel Breanna Philips expressed her hope that the merger between her firm and Ashurst will bring some soul-searching and tangible change in managing hostile work environments.
Per Philips’s own account, here is the rough timeline. In September 2025, a female partner who was Philips’s direct supervisor allegedly started a rumor that Philips had been sexually assaulted by a male partner in another group. That rumor resulted, Philips says, in a closed-door meeting — “held without notice,” per the email Philips sent firm leadership in January — in which the male partner in question asked Philips about her sexual history.
There is approximately no version of HR training that recommends that response.
Philips reported both the rumor and the closed-door meeting to HR. “I was concerned that request might not be taken seriously, so I escalated to a more senior HR representative a few days later,” Philips writes. “And a third HR representative joined shortly after to lead the investigation.” Despite this, Philips just waited.
A month later, in October, the husband of the supervising partner — who was himself a former Perkins partner — sent the aforementioned “greetings, sad people” email to Philips’s work account.
Quick housekeeping: the firm has noted that all the partners involved have left, though Philips’s account makes clear that the female partner accused of starting the rumors was still her supervisor when this happened, and Bloomberg reports the female partner left “of her own accord due to an unrelated reason.”
The email itself — you can read it in full (with names redacted) — accuses Philips and another Perkins lawyer of spreading the rumor that the husband was “having, or interested in having, an affair.” The partner’s husband insists that an affair with him would be “about as plausible as my being one of the people who robbed the Louvre,” which is a bizarre tonal shift in such a confrontational email. He then suggests Philips and her colleague are “needy, gossipy vampires” who “suck the life out of” his wife. He recommends that Philips read David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” — perhaps the most stuck-in-the-90s-Pacific-Northwest advice ever — and “stop emulating it.”
The male senior lawyer also expresses his hope that the email humiliates the junior female lawyer — “If receiving this is humiliating or embarrassing for you, if it makes you scared or feel shame, that’s good. It should.” — and signs off “Sincerely (more sincere than you can possibly imagine).”
Where did this rumor come from? According to the Philips account:
I called the sender and the female partner immediately. He told me that during a marital spat, she accused him of having an affair—an idea she later tried to blame on another associate, also copied on the email. When he asked her who the affair was supposedly with, she named me.
As she explains “my direct supervisor had now sexualized me two times (first the assault rumor, second, the affair lie),” which seems to be an accurate characterization of those alleged facts. This is why firms have HR departments. Philips claims HR told her to “do nothing” and she took that as an indication that it was being handled by personnel. Apparently, it wasn’t.
By January, Philips had had enough and sent a January 21 email to HR, employment counsel, and several firm leaders. The email listed seven specific items she expected the firm to address, including the September rumor, the closed-door meeting in which a partner asked her about her sexual history, and “the firm’s decision to let [the husband partner] attend the Christmas party this year, despite knowing of his harassing messages.” She requested a written response by January 28, but also WAIT, THEY LET THE GUY GO TO THE HOLIDAY PARTY! That seems… problematic.
According to Philips, only after this email did the firm tell her a third-party investigator would be retained, and the outside investigator first contacted her on February 27 — roughly five months after she first reported the rumor.
Perkins Coie provided a statement to Bloomberg:
“Perkins Coie has long sought to foster an inclusive workplace that values a broad array of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences,” the firm said Thursday. “When an employee raises a concern with HR, it is fully investigated, including in some cases by a third party, and appropriate action taken.”
Sort of glosses over the five-month lag.
And that’s the assessment Philips makes in another LinkedIn post, noting her “concern is not whether outside investigators are ever used; it is that a prompt, neutral investigation did not happen here. That distinction matters.” It does.
Honestly, if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Philips still works at Perkins Coie and was, in fact, promoted to counsel in January. That should not be remarkable, but unfortunately, corporate America is littered with stories of junior female employees getting tagged with some sort of previously undisclosed “performance issue” and nudged out the door as companies move to shield managers. The response described in these posts is unacceptable, but it could have been much worse.
The tie-up with Ashurst will produce a roughly $2.8 billion, 3,000-lawyer transatlantic operation. “Seem reasonable to require accountability amongst partners and HR personnel?” as Philips puts it to Ashurst. “Certainly seems to be less monetary exposure in doing so.”
As for suggestions, she writes:
At a minimum, these questions should be asked: 1. Is there an internal SOP for investigating complaints, and will the firm commit to making a copy available? 2. What disciplinary action exists for misconduct, and is application discretionary or structured? 3. Will the firm commit to supplying partners with demographic data for recent firings?
She addressed these to her own future firm, but these should be questions every law firm takes a second to make sure they know how to answer. Because law firms are a lot closer to hosting a hostile work environment than they think.
Perkins Coie Hires Investigator for Counsel’s Harassment Claims [Bloomberg Law News]
Earlier: The Next Transatlantic Biglaw Heavyweight: Ashurst Ties The Knot With Perkins Coie
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
