Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

A former Winston & Strawn partner suing the firm for gender bias is appealing her case being sent to arbitration.

In court papers filed Friday with California's First District Court of Appeal, Constance Ramos and her legal team pushed back against a late November ruling by a San Francisco judge that sent her case to arbitration. A status conference in the litigation set for Jan. 31 had recently been pushed back to August as a result of that decision.

Ramos, a former Hawaiian high school classmate of President Barack Obama, sued Winston & Strawn last August in San Francisco County Superior Court. Ramos accused the firm of discriminating and retaliating against her after a male colleague she joined Winston & Strawn with in 2014 resigned from the firm less than two years later.

The suit filed by Ramos put her in a growing group of women claiming to have faced various forms of sexual discrimination in Big Law. Just last week, national labor and employment firm Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart was hit with a $300 million gender bias suit by Dawn Knepper, a nonequity partner employed by the Am Law 100 firm in Costa Mesa, California.

Winston & Strawn retained Lynne Hermle, a high-powered labor and employment litigator with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in Menlo Park, California, to lead its defense. Hermle and Winston & Strawn quickly sought to move Ramos' suit to arbitration, claiming that she had agreed to an arbitration clause when Ramos was hired from Hogan Lovells.

Superior Court Judge John Stewart granted Winston & Strawn's motion to arbitrate the suit on Nov. 30, finding that a “partnership relationship” existed between the firm and Ramos.

“However, the court finds that the provisions related to venue and cost sharing are unconscionable and will be severed from the arbitration agreement,” Stewart wrote in his one-page order. He asked both parties to hold the arbitration in San Francisco.

Ramos left Winston & Strawn, where she was an income or nonshare partner, last summer. She now operates her own Oakland, California-based intellectual property firm called Akira IP. Ramos said Friday that she and her lawyer—Noah Lebowitz of San Francisco's Duckworth Peters Lebowitz Olivier—have filed a petition appealing Stewart's ruling.

The 57-page appeal argues that Stewart erred in determining that even as an income partner at Winston & Strawn she did not qualify as an employee—a frequently contested claim in gender discrimination cases against law firms—and that any arbitration clause Ramos entered into with her former firm could not be broadly interpreted.

Lebowitz and Ramos also take issue with the likely makeup of any arbitral panel, one that requires it be comprised of partners from U.S.-based firms with more than 500 lawyers, creating something akin to a “fox guarding the henhouse” scenario that “can only bias the arbitration process against [Ramos] from the outset,” according to her appeal.

At the time Ramos, a former partner at now-defunct Howrey, left Hogan Lovells for Winston & Strawn in early 2014, the latter had 228 capital or equity partners and 156 income partners, according to court papers, which allege that her employment at Winston & Strawn was “at-will” and could be terminated at any time “upon vote by secret ballot of two-thirds of the capital partners” in the firm.

Winston & Strawn, which did not return a request for comment about its dispute with Ramos, is not the first firm to find success in pushing a gender bias claim into arbitration.

In late 2016, now-defunct Sedgwick prevailed in its effort to force into arbitration a similar suit filed by former nonequity insurance partner Traci Ribeiro. The case was subsequently resolved on undisclosed terms and Ribeiro joined a Chicago-based firm as Sedgwick headed toward dissolution this month.

Steptoe & Johnson also fired back last year at gender bias allegations filed by a former associate, Ji-In Houck, urging a federal judge to send her suit against the firm to arbitration. Beyond the push to arbitrate, Steptoe & Johnson's defense team at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer criticized the allegations levied by Houck, claiming they were an “attempt to conflate her own dissatisfaction with her own atypical career.”

Houck, however, argued that Steptoe & Johnson is trying to bury her gender bias allegations by arbitrating the case in closed proceedings. In the suit filed last week by Knepper against Ogletree Deakins, her lawyers from Sanford Heisler Sharp (a firm well-versed in Big Law gender bias cases) have launched a pre-emptive strike on any attempts to arbitrate.

Other firms such as Proskauer Rose and Chadbourne & Parke, the latter of which was absorbed last summer into Norton Rose Fulbright, continue to grapple with their own gender bias cases, which despite recent publicity, have a long history in Big Law.