Another Biglaw Firm Gets Hit With A Class-Action Gender Discrimination Lawsuit
Which firm got hit with a lawsuit now?
Steptoe & Johnson has now joined the ranks of Chadbourne & Parke, Proskauer Rose, LeClairRyan, and Sedgwick as a defendant in a gender discrimination lawsuit. The suit against Steptoe, filed yesterday in a Los Angeles federal court by Ji-In Lee Houck, a former contract attorney and associate at Steptoe, alleges a pay disparity for women associates, as Law.com reports:
“Despite paying lip-service to diversity in its workforce, and even counseling the firm’s own clients on policies to avoid pay discrimination, defendant Steptoe & Johnson LLP … subjects its female attorneys to unequal pay,” Houck’s lawyer, Lori Andrus of Andrus Anderson, wrote in the complaint.
Houck, who is now a litigator at Stalwart Law Group, alleges that when she started at the firm in 2013 as a contract attorney, her $85,000 salary was below that of others doing similar work at the firm, despite getting stellar annual performance reviews. By 2014, Houck was moved to an official associate position, but she says that did not rectify the pay disparity:
Houck’s salary did increase as she stayed longer at Steptoe—in June 2014, the firm officially designated her as an associate and raised her pay to $130,000, and she received another bump up to $160,000 in January 2015. But, the complaint said, that still left her short of male counterparts who at that point would have been making $210,000. Shortly before she left Steptoe in March 2016, the firm gave her another raise to $200,000, which was retroactive back to the start of 2016.
The complaint also references at least one other woman at the firm who was also allegedly paid less than male counterparts.
The firm disputes the claims in the complaint:
Steptoe issued a statement on Tuesday responding to the lawsuit, saying the firm “is a strong supporter of women lawyers and professionals,” and noting that in 2016 its new partner class was 50 percent women and, in 2017, 80 percent of new partners were women.
….“The allegations of associate pay discrimination in this lawsuit by a former junior associate who was hired as a contract attorney and stayed with the firm for less than three years are completely without merit, and we will vigorously defend ourselves against such baseless claims,” Steptoe’s statement said.
We’ll be following the lawsuit with interest.