Welcome to Labor of Law—I'm Mike Scarcella in Washington, and you can reach me at [email protected] and on Twitter @MikeScarcella. Thanks for reading!

Pay Equity Practices Get Boost

Just a couple of years ago, Littler Mendelson and Fisher & Phillips created free-standing pay equity practices offering clients pay-gap audits, litigation defense and compliance counseling. Now, more firms are responding with their own practices, my colleague Meredith Hobbs reports at Law.com.

>> “The increased focus on pay equity in the media, courts, legislatures and on social media has certainly filtered down and caused an uptick in the number of lawsuits we're seeing that touch on pay equity issues,” Denise Visconti, Littler's practice head, said. Visconti, based in San Diego, said the firm first started thinking about a pay equity practice in 2015 after a fair-pay bill appeared in the California legislature.

>> “We saw that it was becoming a hot issue—and likely will be for decades to come,” said Fisher Phillips employment litigator Kathy Caminiti, who co-chairs the practice with Cheryl Pinarchick and Cheryl Behymer. Pinarchick said the firm discussed a specific practice in 2016, around the time then presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton was calling for stricter pay transparency laws.

>> Visconti said Littler has seen a marked uptick of pay discrimination claims across the country. The firm has handled several hundred suits in the past two years that “touched on some element of pay equity,” she said, including as part of a broader wrongful termination or bias suit. Fisher Philips' Caminiti said: “I think we're seeing just the tip of the iceberg for this litigation.”

>> Fisher Phillips said it has 20 dedicated lawyers on its team. The firm has created an interactive map that tracks pay equity laws by state, including Alabama, which just passed one this month. Littler has about 10 lawyers and another 10 undergoing subject matter training for the team, in addition a group of data scientists and a lawyer with a PhD in statistics.

'Because of Sex': Merits Briefing at SCOTUS

The U.S. Supreme Court next term will hear a trio of cases that confront the scope of LGBT protections under Title VII. Two merits briefs—arguing for broad protections—were filed Wednesday in the high court.

Aimee Stephens, the funeral home employee who alleges she was fired for being transgender, is represented by John Knight of the ACLU. Buckley Beal's Brian Sutherland in Atlanta represents Gerald Bostock, who claims a Georgia county unlawfully retaliated against him for being gay.

What follows are highlights from the new briefs:

>> “The unambiguous text of Title VII prohibited Harris Homes from firing Ms. Stephens because of her sex. It is irrelevant whether the Congress that enacted Title VII contemplated its application to transgender employees. Statutes must be interpreted based on their text rather than on an assessment of their originally anticipated applications. Any exception to Title VII permitting sex discrimination against transgender employees would have to come from Congress, not this court.” (Knight)

>> “Title VII must be read to prohibit sexual orientation discrimination because the contrary interpretation is profoundly unworkable. The raft of conflicting lower court decisions in cases with similar facts but markedly different outcomes threatens the consistency and predictability necessary for the rule of law.” (Sutherland)

>> “Excluding transgender people from Title VII's protections against the imposition of sex stereotypes would also lead to inconsistent and unworkable results. Under such a framework, an employer would be permitted to fire a person it perceived as an excessively feminine man if that person were a transgender woman, but not if that person were a non-transgender man.” (Knight)

>> “The ambitious goal of Title VII was to destroy not only the barriers to merit-based equal employment opportunity posed by racism, but also those posed by sexism and insistence on traditional gender roles.” (Sutherland)

We'll check back in as other merits and amicus briefs are filed.

Who Got the Work

• A team from Jones Day, including appellate partner Shay Dvoretzky in Washington, represented SkyWest Airlines Inc. in a labor dispute at the U.S. Supreme Court. The petitioners were current and former flight attendants who filed a putative class action. Gregory F. Coleman filed the petition in May. The Supreme Court denied the petition Monday.

• Margaret Campbell, an Olgetree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart shareholder in Atlanta, and associate Amy Jensen represented Synovus Financial Corp. in a whistleblower case at the U.S. Labor Department. An appeals board recently ruledfor Synovus. “Upon review of the ALJ's Order, we conclude that the ALJ's Order is well-reasoned and based on the undisputed facts and the applicable law. The ALJ properly concluded that the motion failed to allege proper grounds of fraud on the court,” the panel said.

• “A black female University of Idaho law professor has filed a lawsuit against the university, its law school and a former dean alleging race and gender discrimination and retaliation,” the Idaho Statesman reports. Erika Birch, T. Guy Hallam Jr. and Lourdes Matsumoto of the Boies firm Strindberg & Scholnick represent plaintiff Shaakirrah Sanders. Read the complaint here.

Around the Water Cooler

How I Made Partner: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius' Terry Johnson. Meet Terry Johnson (at left), a Morgan Lewis labor and employment partner in New Jersey. “Just being a good lawyer is usually not enough. In my years at the firm, I have known many good lawyers who did not make partner. During the partnership process, I also had to demonstrate the ability to raise my profile within the legal community, the skills to maintain and grow client relationships, and the potential to develop business. At the end of the day, a law firm is a business.” He added at another part of the Q&A: “The key to developing business boils down to one thing—relationships. In my experience, there are two types of business development opportunities at big law firms like Morgan Lewis—internal client development and external client development.” [Law.com]

The NLJ 500: Climbing Mountains, Cracking Ceilings. “Firms best known for practices that have traditionally attracted more women lawyers—namely, immigration and labor and employment—remained leaders on the Women's Scorecard. But other firms, particularly some on the Am Law 200, are angling to climb up the list by diversifying lateral searches for partners.” [NLJ]

Former WeWork Executives Allege Gender, Age Discrimination. “WeWork Cos. is being sued by two former executives who are accusing the shared-office company of gender and age discrimination as it gears up for an initial public offering.” Read the complaint filed in the Manhattan state court. [WSJ] More here at Law.com.

Accenture Retrains Its Workers as Technology Upends Their Jobs. “The acceleration of automation across industries has thrown Accenture and its workforce into an identity crisis. The consulting company, which counts 92 of the Fortune 100 companies as clients, touts what it calls a people-first culture. Yet it has become one of the world's largest providers of outsourced labor and has a growing business helping clients automate their own work.” [WSJ]

Oracle Women Fight for Class-Action Status in Gender Pay Lawsuit. “Three women at Oracle Corp. are trying to persuade a state court to let them represent more than 4,000 peers in a case claiming that the database giant pays men better for doing the same jobs, in violation of California's Equal Pay Act.” [Bloomberg]

Notable Moves & Announcements

Reed Smith announced the arrival of Lori Armstrong Halber as partner in its Philadelphia office. Armstrong Halber was formerly a partner with Fisher & Phillips, where she was a member of the firm's women's initiative and leadership council steering committee.

Drinker Biddle & Reath has named Cheryl Orr as regional partner in charge of the San Francisco office. Orr is a partner and chairwoman of the firm's labor and employment practice group. She succeeds Vernon Zvoleff in that role.