The Paula Deen Race Case: From Demand to Dismissal

Update: As reported by various media outlets, Lisa Jackson's lawsuit against Paul Deen ended with settlement Friday. The terms were not disclosed.

On July 22, local solo practitioner Wesley Woolf and Matthew Billips, of four-lawyer Atlanta employment litigation shop Billips & Benjamin, ducked out of the 90-degree heat in downtown Savannah, Georgia, and into the cool of a two-story law office across one of the city’s iconic squares from the federal courthouse. The 49-year-old Billips, with a shaved head and an intense gaze, and the taller Woolf, 54, with thinning sandy hair, were headed to their first meeting with newly hired lawyers on the other side of the most notorious case either had ever taken on. For the moment, at least, they seemed to be in command.

Woolf and Billips represent Lisa Jackson, a former manager at Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House, a Savannah-area eatery co-owned by celebrity chef Paula Deen and her brother, Earl “Bubba” Hiers. More than a year earlier, in March 2012, Jackson, a white woman, had sued Deen, Hiers, and their companies for racial and sexual harassment. Despite the explosive allegations and Deen’s prominent profile, the litigation had proceeded quietly for the most part until a month earlier, when The National Enquirer published excerpts from Deen’s deposition testimony in the case, billing them as part of a “racist rant.” In answering questions about her racial attitudes, the celebrity chef had unwittingly sent a verbal wrecking ball squarely into her own brand. “Of course” she had used the n-word “a very long time ago,” Deen said. And, yes, she had once said she’d like to use a plantation-era theme for her brother’s wedding, complete with a wait staff composed entirely of black men.

The fallout was swift—and harsh. Companies that had happily tied themselves to the Dixie doyenne dropped her like a hot hushpuppy. Soon, Deen was doing some dumping of her own. She jettisoned 116-year-old Savannah firm Oliver Maner, which had represented her since 2001, before her first cooking show aired. Gone as well: Hiers’s two lawyers from Georgia’s Gillen, Withers & Lake. In their place, Deen turned to a Morgan, Lewis & Bockius team led by employment litigation partner Grace Speights, the managing partner of the Am Law 100 firm’s Washington, D.C., office. Citing an unnamed source, various media outlets said Deen had made the change because her original attorneys were “out of their depth.”

On this midsummer afternoon, Speights was waiting for Woolf and Billips in an upstairs conference room with attorneys from 12-lawyer Weiner, Shearouse, Weitz, Greenberg & Shawe, the Savannah litigation boutique that had taken over as Deen’s local counsel and was hosting the sit-down. The idea now was to lower the heat in the combustible case and, perhaps, move toward a settlement. And though no one involved in the hour-and-15-minute-long session would divulge what was discussed, the firestorm surrounding the suit had begun to subside. The court docket showed little of consequence happening over the next few weeks, and the media, for the most part, had moved on to fresh tabloid fodder.

Then, on August 12, federal district court judge William Moore upended the case just as settlement talks were getting serious, issuing what amounted to a bombshell, if legally predictable, ruling: as a white plaintiff claiming neither economic harm to herself nor retaliation for complaining about alleged anti-black bias, Jackson did not have standing to pursue racial discrimination claims. Her sexual discrimination claims were, however, left intact.