If you oppose WM for any reason, I'd advise you not to exaggerate, because you might sound like a loony activist, instead of a well-respected (or feared) lawyer.
Jocelyn Larkin of the Impact Fund, a lawyer assisting in the Betty Dukes sex discrimination class action, sprouted this in September:
What is the nut of the Wal-Mart case?Ms. Larkin should know better. That WM discriminates in wages in every single store, every job, everywhere has NOT been demonstrated using the wage data she used the courts to forcibly extract from WM. Nor has this been confirmed from any other data source. It doesn't even pass the laugh test.In every store in every job in the country, women are being paid less than men for doing the same exact job.
In fact, WM has specifically denied this:
Ms. Larkin, you should be representing the women who have been unlawfully terminated, sexually harrassed, or otherwise illegally interfered with. Stop playing ideological games against WM... The WM case might be "the largest" civil rights case--in terms of numbers--, but it is nowhere near the most important for the advancement of civil rights. I would venture that only a incredibly small number of the 1.6 million women certified in the case have been actually been the victim of sexism. Also, although you might not want to admit it, the average person knows that there are real, actual, sometimes personal, non-sexist reasons that women are willing to work for less in the same job (most notably that men are willing to take many dirty jobs that women won't).
The company said it will appeal this latest decision, claiming the lawsuit ignores the fact that thousands of female employees make more than their male counterparts. A spokeswoman said Wal-Mart continued to re-evaluate its employment practices but that a new pay structure and new rules on filling job vacancies had been introduced.
I'm not a subscriber to California Lawyer, which detailed how the plaintiff's lawyers put this entire lawsuit together:
How could The Impact Fund-a three-lawyer nonprofit located in a redwood building on the Berkeley marina-pull off a victory of this magnitude? Seligman doesn't even have a legal secretary. Yet in a four-year campaign, he coordinated a network of 18 lawyers from three private law firms and two other nonprofits. His success was grounded in more than a decade of experience settling Title VII lawsuits, a clever litigation strategy, use of an online document depository-and enough chutzpah to believe he could beat that quintessentially American corporation from Bentonville, Arkansas.The law fellow noted above, Marisa, has her own blog, and writes about the WM class action from time to time.Though Seligman loves to play David to Wal-Mart's Goliath, he is one of the most successful class action lawyers in the country. In 1991 he retired as partner at Oakland's Saperstein Seligman Mayeda & Larkin after just eleven years of practice in the Title VII litigation boutique founded by Guy Saperstein and Charles Farnsworth. During that time Seligman had participated in more than 35 victories, including a twelve-year class action against State Farm that settled for $255 million, the largest damage award at the time in a sex-discrimination case. (Kraszewski v. State Farm Gen. Ins. Co., 912 F. 2d 1182 (9th Cir. 1990).) Attorneys fees from the victories made the partners rich....
With his earnings, Seligman could have bought a winery or a tropical island. Instead, he put up $1.24 million to launch The Impact Fund, an organization intended to train and support lawyers interested in bringing class actions that promised significant social change. The fund has a staff of three attorneys-Seligman, Jocelyn D. Larkin, and Marisa Arrona, a law fellow whose salary is subsidized by several large firms. In addition to civil rights cases, the fund supports environmental and poverty law class actions that are no longer eligible for Legal Services Corporation funding. Since its founding in 1993 The Impact Fund has awarded more than $3.5 million to nonprofit and private law firm grantees, who are expected to repay the grants if their lawsuits are successful.
"What we bring to the table is a blueprint for how to litigate a case," Seligman says. "We don't put in the majority of the money, we don't put in the majority of the resources, and God knows we don't put in the majority of the staff."The idea of bringing a nationwide class action against Wal-Mart began with a pair of plaintiffs attorneys in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1990s Stephen Tinkler and Merit Bennett, then partners in Tinkler & Bennett, had brought a series of lawsuits against Wal-Mart for sexual discrimination and sexual harassment. "It wasn't easy," says Tinkler. "Wal-Mart's legal strategy on every case was to fight it to the ends of the earth."
Posted by Kevin on November, 9 2004 at 03:28 PM
