Ogletree Deakins and LA-Based Partner Hit With Sex Harassment Suit
The new lawsuit claims the firm did nothing about the plaintiff's internal complaints about unwanted come-ons and sexually explicit talk from a Los Angeles-based partner.
February 21, 2018 at 06:41 PM
4 minute read
A little more than a month after being hit with a $300 million gender discrimination lawsuit, labor and employment law firm Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart has been sued by an ex-employee who alleges he was sexually harassed by a partner.
The new suit, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of a John Doe plaintiff, claims the firm did nothing about the plaintiff's internal complaints about unwanted come-ons and sexually explicit talk from Los Angeles-based partner Johnnie James. Doe also claims the firm discriminated against him because he is a gay Latino.
“Despite providing legal representation to companies of all sizes, specifically in the area of employment law, and purporting to value diversity, Ogletree has an ongoing practice of discriminating against and harassing its own minority employees, specifically its own minority attorneys,” wrote Doe's lawyers at Santa Monica's Shegerian & Associates.
James didn't respond to an email message Wednesday afternoon. An Olgetree Deakins spokeswoman said in an emailed statement that while it takes “the allegations filed by a former staff attorney very seriously, the salacious nature of these allegations do not make them true and cannot change the facts.”
“We promptly and fully investigated these allegations once they were brought to our attention, and subsequently determined them to be false, unsubstantiated or deficient,” the spokeswoman said. “Far from being terminated by the firm, upon voluntarily resigning the plaintiff accepted a partner position at another defense firm, which in fact is currently defending approximately ten cases brought by the plaintiff's attorney in this matter.”
Doe, described in the complaint as “a 37-year-old, Mexican-American, gay male who began working as a staff attorney and, later, of counsel at Ogletree,” claims James started harassing him shortly after he joined the firm in July 2015. According to the complaint, James told the plaintiff he enjoyed three-way sex and that he was looking for a third person to have sex with him and his husband. James also allegedly told Doe about his porn-viewing habits and showed him explicit material on this phone. Doe claims he told another partner and four associates about James' “extremely inappropriate” remarks during an October 2015 firm retreat, only to have word get back to James about his complaint.
“Ogletree also took no action against James and did not discipline him, despite his improper and illegal conduct toward Doe,” wrote Doe's lawyers.
On top of the harassment claims, Doe's lawyers claim he did the work of a regular associate, but was paid more like a staff attorney. Doe claims that even when he was given a title bump to ”of counsel” at the firm in June 2017, his salary was still at least $30,000 less than associates with the equivalent amount of experience.
Doe claims that after he was assigned to work on three new cases with James, he emailed the firm's director of human resources in July 2017 to say he felt compelled to leave because of “ongoing sexual harassment by a partner, discrimination by the firm, and that his prior complaints about the issues” had gone nowhere. Doe claims that his departure at the end of that month amounted to a “constructive termination.”
The suit is seeking economic damages as well as damages for psychological and emotional distress, and punitive damages. Shegerian & Associates Anthony Nguyen said the fact that Doe wasn't explicitly fired means this is “not your traditional type of employment case.” But, he said, judges and juries understand an employee can effectively be forced out when employers fail to fix an unworkable environment. “More often than not, a lot of these employers know better than to fire an employee,” Nguyen said.
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