University of Denver Sturm College of Law (courtesy photo).

The University of Denver Sturm College of Law has agreed to increase the compensation of an associate professor who sued in June, claiming she was underpaid compared with her male and nonminority faculty colleagues, the professor's lawyer said Thursday.

The university is boosting plaintiff Rashmi Goel's annual pay; giving her an annual stipend for her work with the law school's Rocky Mountain Collective on Race, Place & Law; compensating her for back pay and emotional distress; and paying her attorney fees, said Goel's attorney, Charlotte Sweeney of the Denver firm Sweeney & Bechtold.

"I think it's a great resolution for her," said Sweeney following the Jan. 2 dismissal of the suit. "It gets her to a salary she should have been at anyway and it compensates her for the loss of salary over a period of years. Also, it recognizes that she's doing additional work, far and above many of her colleagues, on this additional project and deserved compensation for it."

Sweeney declined to specify the amount of Goel's pay increase, noting that her client is bound under a confidentiality agreement. A university spokesman confirmed the settlement Thursday.

"A mutual agreement has been reached in this case allowing both parties to move forward" reads a university statement. "One of the University of Denver's cornerstone commitments it to ensure that our academic community compensates faculty and staff fairly, equitably and based on merit. These are values that we hold in highest regard and seek, always, to model in our community."

It's the second time in under two years that the law school has agreed to increase pay for female faculty. It entered into a consent decree with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May 2018, under which it paid $2.66 million to female law professors who for years were paid less than their male colleagues.

The EEOC sued the school in 2016, three years after longtime law professor Lucy Marsh filed a complaint alleging the school was systematically paying female faculty less than similarly situated men. In addition to Marsh, six other female law professors at the school with tenure eventually joined as plaintiffs.

Goel was not part of that suit, and didn't know of her own pay discrepancy until last February when the law school disclosed faculty salaries, according to her complaint. She alleged that she was the lowest paid of the school's 12 associate professors, despite having been on the faculty since 2002, and earned more than $30,000 less than the average salary among that cohort. Ten of those professors are male or non-Asian. Goel, who is Asian, earns between $40,000 and $50,000 less annually than other associate professors with comparable experience, according to her complaint.

Goel and the law school entered into mediation talks in December and were able to reach a settlement agreement, Sweeney said.

"Hopefully, this will put the law school on the right track," Sweeney said. "In conjunction with the consent decree that was entered in the other case, there's now a labor economist looking at them every year, and there's a monitor who is supposed to be evaluating everything annually. This should get them turned in the right direction."