A new gender discrimination lawsuit puts Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart among a growing group of large law firms facing allegations that they short-changed women lawyers on pay and business-generation opportunities.

The latest complaint strikes on themes that are similar to those in other recent suits against law firms, many of them brought by the same lawyers at Sanford Heisler Sharp.

Represented by David Sanford and others from Sanford Heisler, plaintiff Dawn Knepper, a nonequity shareholder in Ogletree Deakins' Orange County, California, office, on Friday filed a proposed class action seeking $300 million in San Francisco federal court. Knepper's suit claims that Ogletree Deakins pays an average of $110,000 more to male shareholders than their female counterparts and that the firm's promotion practices are not “remotely equal” along gender lines. The complaint alleges that while women make up 58 percent of the firm's associates, only 32 percent of Ogletree Deakins shareholders are women.

The firm issued a statement in response to the allegations, saying it would defend itself while remaining “steadfast in our commitment to equal opportunity for all.”

“Equal opportunity has been a core principle of Ogletree Deakins since the firm's founding, and we do not tolerate discrimination of any kind—gender or otherwise. We take the allegations filed by one California shareholder very seriously,” the statement said. “However, the decision-making process that governs our compensation system is both fair and equitable.”

Knepper's complaint follows a string of other gender bias lawsuits that women lawyers have brought against firms in recent years, including 2016 lawsuits against Chadbourne & Parke, now part of Norton Rose Fulbright, and the now-defunct Sedgwick, and 2017 lawsuits against Proskauer Rose, Steptoe & Johnson LLP and Winston & Strawn. The case against Sedgwick has since settled, while the Winston & Strawn suit, brought by a former nonequity partner, was sent to arbitration in November. The others remain pending.

While Knepper's claims against Ogletree Deakins echo the earlier suits in many respects, her suit also has some unique aspects and at least a few distinguishing features.

Walking the Walk?

The recent sex bias suits generally allege that, as advisers to other employers, the law firms should have known better. But the earlier gender bias suits took aim at general service law firms, whereas Ogletree Deakins, as a firm, specializes in labor and employment issues and typically defends large employers in gender bias cases such as Knepper's.

That dynamic makes for a particularly strong theme in the suit against Ogletree Deakins, in which Knepper alleges that “the firm has shirked its obligations under the law through its 'do as I say not as I do' practices.”

Seeking to make that point explicit, Knepper recounts an alleged incident in which a female shareholder at the firm asked C. Matthew Keen, Ogletree Deakins' managing shareholder, about the firm's response to gender discrimination complaints. Keen's alleged reply, according to Knepper's lawsuit: “We're not real good at practicing what we preach.”

Lack of Equity

The Ogletree Deakins suit comes at a time when, in the Proskauer and Chadbourne cases, courts are poised to grapple with the key question of whether equity partners can be considered employees for the purposes of federal employment laws, or if they're excluded from those protections in light of their ownership stakes in the firms.

As The American Lawyer has previously reported, that issue could boil down to an analysis of how much control equity partners have over day-to-day matters, how the firm's central management is structured, and other factors. But the Ogletree Deakins case presents a different situation. Knepper is a nonequity shareholder and is seeking to represent a class of women at the firm who find themselves in the same position.

That, in turn, may put her in a stronger position to argue that she serves Ogletree Deakins as an employee, since she holds no ownership stake in the firm. And it could make it harder for Ogletree Deakins' outside counsel, Nancy Abell at Paul Hastings, to push a defense that Knepper is suing under anti-discrimination laws that weren't really designed to protect law firm partners.

First-Strike Assault on Arbitration

Aside from the question of whether partners qualify for employee protections, the potential of private arbitration—as opposed to a public court proceeding—has been another early battleground in many of the recent gender bias cases.

Traci Ribeiro, the former Sedgwick partner who sued that firm, saw her case directed into arbitration before it settled, as did Constance Ramos, the former nonequity partner at Winston & Strawn who sued that firm. A motion to compel arbitration is also awaiting a ruling in the Steptoe lawsuit, filed by Ji-In Houck, a former contract lawyer who eventually became an associate there.

Friday's filings indicate that arbitration issues are likely to take center stage early in the Ogletree Deakins case as well. But they also demonstrate a unique approach by Knepper and her lawyers at Sanford Heisler.

Instead of waiting for Ogletree Deakins to file a motion to compel arbitration, Knepper lodged a separate declaratory judgment action on Friday that pre-empts a likely bid to arbitrate. The separate complaint seeks to convince a judge that Knepper “never signed, or otherwise assented to, any arbitration agreement, and thus, no agreement to arbitrate any issue was ever formed.”