Kerrie Campbell
(photo by Diego M. Radzinschi)

A federal magistrate judge ruled Thursday that Chadbourne & Parke leaders who are named as defendants in a $100 million gender bias suit against the now-defunct firm must search their personal email accounts for potentially relevant documents that would be subject to review by the plaintiffs.

Ruling from the bench in Manhattan federal court, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Moses sided with lawyers for former Chadbourne partners Kerrie Campbell, Mary Yelenick and Jaroslawa Zelinsky Johnson in a discovery dispute over the personal email accounts of several members of Chadbourne's leadership. A Sanford Heisler Sharp team led by David Sanford represents the women in the case, which alleges that Chadbourne paid women partners less and offered them fewer business development opportunities than their male counterparts.

The ruling comes as the former partners and Chadbourne, now part of Norton Rose Fulbright, remain in the midst of limited discovery related to the women's employment status at Chadbourne. The two sides were ordered to search for documents that could help determine whether the three women qualify for protection under federal employment laws, or if their former partner roles make them business owners who fall outside the scope of those protections.

Lawyers for Chadbourne, led by Kathleen McKenna of Proskauer Rose, argued that there was no need to look through the personal email accounts because none of the individual defendants—firm leaders and management committee members Abbe Lowell, Marc Alpert, Andrew Giaccia, Howard Seife, Lawrence Rosenberg and Paul Weber—conducted firm business on those accounts.

On the opposing side, the women partners' legal team at Sanford Heisler noted that the plaintiffs were already being required to look through their own personal email accounts and argued that the defendants should have to do the same.

Moses, who's overseeing discovery issues while U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken is hearing the case, said in court Thursday that both sides should have to look through personal email accounts for relevant evidence, similar to what they're doing for emails in the firm's account.

“My inclination is to say what's good for the goose is good for the gander here,” said Moses. She later added, “Search the personal accounts.”

Although she ruled in their favor on the personal email issue, the magistrate judge also shot down another request by the women suing Chadbourne. Their lawyers had sought emails from three additional former Chadbourne partners that may have addressed the level of control that the firm's management committee exerted over the firm and its partners.

On that request, Moses said she wasn't convinced that those three former partners would have any emails that weren't already included in documents from the management committee that Chadbourne has previously agreed to turn over. In light of that conclusion, the judge denied the request for now.

With her decision, Moses put to rest the latest in a set of thorny discovery issues that have arisen in the case. In October, she resolved a dispute over whether Chadbourne had done enough to disclose which partners were paid under individual guarantees and the dollar value of profits distributed to partners.

The Chadbourne case is one of a group of gender discrimination lawsuits currently targeting large law firms.