(Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM)

Jones Day has asked a judge to sanction the Sanford Heisler Sharp attorneys who are litigating a $200 million gender discrimination lawsuit against the firm, alleging they failed to research their claims.

In a motion filed Friday, Jones Day said Sanford Heisler never bothered to probe the allegations at the core of the lawsuit: that the firm pays female associates less than it pays male associates for equal work. A four-attorney team featuring Beth Heifetz, who heads Jones Day's issues and appeals practice, and Europe partner-in-charge Mary Ellen Powers wants all claims based on disparate pay shorn from the lawsuit, as well as an order granting fees and costs associated with litigating the motion.

"Their principal theory of the case—that the proof of discrimination is the fact that plaintiffs did not earn "Cravath scale"—was sophistry on its own terms," the Jones Day attorneys said. "And, to make matters worse, plaintiffs knew facts that contradicted their theory and knew no facts that supported it."

The six named plaintiffs—Nilab Rahyar Tolton, Andrea Mazingo, Meredith Williams, and  Jaclyn Stahl, who all worked for the firm in California, along with former Atlanta associate Saira Draper and former New York associate Katrina Henderson—have alleged that the black box compensation structure employed by the firm helps enable discriminatory pay. On Wednesday, they asked a Washington, D.C., federal judge to conditionally certify the case as a collective action under the Equal Pay Act.

But Jones Day went directly after these same claims in its 21-page motion for sanctions, contending that deposition testimony revealed the women had discussed compensation with their colleagues while at the firm, and learned facts that contradicted their pay allegations.

The firm denoted the core claim of the case as the "Cravath theory," asserting that the plaintiffs conflate Jones Day's assertions that it pays associates market-rate pay with the widely publicized "Cravath scale" of associate wages offered by Cravath, Swaine & Moore. It said this theory was aptly distilled in Williams' deposition.

"So just sort of combining Jones Day's representation that top performing candidates are making market, neither myself nor any of the women I know are making market, I have to assume that Jones Day's representation was truthful and someone is making market, and I would understand that that would be the male associates," Williams testified.

But Jones Day called this both "deeply flawed logic" and "pure speculation," arguing that discovery revealed none of the plaintiffs outside of New York knew any men who were paid along the Cravath scale.

In addition, the firm contends that none of the plaintiffs indicated any knowledge of how the Cravath scale actually worked. In depositions, several acknowledged that Cravath's salaries likely took productivity and internal evaluations into account. Nevertheless, according to Jones Day, they alleged that they were victims of discrimination even in years when their productivity was unacceptably low and their reviews were below average.

Jones Day also attacked the plaintiffs and their attorneys—Deborah Marcuse, Kate Mueting and Russell Kornblith—for their alleged failure to research their allegations, potentially through reaching out to male colleagues at the firm.

"No policy could have precluded plaintiffs' counsel from contacting the alleged comparators, for example, to determine whether there was a good-faith basis for claiming that they were paid more than plaintiffs for equal work," the Jones Day attorneys said. "Instead, counsel 'fire[d] shots into the proverbial dark,' making a host of baseless allegations which plaintiffs then touted in the media in a (largely unsuccessful) effort to drum up new plaintiffs."

Kornblith responded in an email that "Jones Day's sanctions motion is a groundless procedural ploy designed to distract from its facially unlawful 'black box' pay secrecy policy, adding that the firm looked forward to responding in court.

Jones Day's filing also included letters from an exchange its team had with the plaintiffs' attorneys after Jones Day threatened to seek sanctions.

The Sanford Heisler lawyers said there was a "wealth of circumstantial evidence" detailing a discriminatory climate at the firm, including "gendered comments, gendered criticism, discriminatory allocation of work, discriminatory performance evaluations, and, as a result, severely limited advancement opportunities for women." And they said that Jones Day's earlier unwillingness to deny that men were paid more than women was a tell.

"You are in possession of all of the relevant evidence and have known of Plaintiffs' allegations for more than a year. We expect that you have long since analyzed the firm's pay data and evaluated the degree to which men and women are paid comparably. We are confident that if you had a basis to deny plaintiffs' allegations of firmwide pay discrimination you would do so, and that if you had evidence to disprove those allegations, you would produce it."

This article has been updated with a response from counsel for the plaintiffs. 

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