A lawyer for Vanina Guerrero, a DLA Piper partner who last week accused the co-managing partner of the firm's Silicon Valley office of sexual assault, is taking advantage of presidential politics to increase pressure over the firm's forced arbitration policy.

Guerrero's attorney, Jeanne Christensen at Wigdor, on Monday released an open letter to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, who is married to a Los Angeles partner at the global law firm.

Christensen cited the California U.S. senator's past public opposition to forced arbitration and asked her to use her high-profile pulpit to speak out against the firm's policy.

"I am sure you would agree that silencing women through forced arbitration must end," she wrote to Harris. "No female employee, including a new partner, would knowingly agree to waive her right to our court system for claims involving sexual assault, battery or rape."

In June, Harris joined her Senate colleague Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, in urging JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon to eliminate a forced arbitration clause used in that company's credit card contracts.

A sentence from that letter led Christensen's letter: "One of the fundamental principles of our democracy is that everyone should get their day in court. Forced arbitration deprives Americans of that basic right."

Guerrero on Oct. 3 distributed an initial open letter addressed to to DLA Piper U.S. co-chairs Roger Meltzer and Jay Rains, asking the pair to release her from her mandatory arbitration agreement with the firm. In that letter and an accompanying filing with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she detailed multiple sexual assaults, as well as a pattern of bullying and later retaliation, deployed by partner Louis Lehot, who also co-chairs the firm's U.S. emerging growth and venture capital group.

In Monday's letter, her attorney expressed hope that Harris had either seen the letter or that her husband Douglas Emhoff, a litigator who joined DLA Piper in September 2017, had shared it with her. She told the senator that DLA Piper had neither released Guerrero from the arbitration clause or even responded to the letter, asserting that the firm had briefly wiped her name and profile from the firm's website Oct. 3 and engaged in other allegedly retaliatory conduct. Guererro's profile was active on the DLA Piper website Monday.

"It is time for DLA Piper to right this senseless wrong by declaring that no female employee, including female partners, will be forced to litigate claims for sexually motivated harm caused by male employees that fail to obey the rules," Christensen added.

Harris's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

A spokesman for DLA Piper said Oct. 3 that the firm had taken immediate steps to investigate once Guerrero went public with the accusations against Lehot. The firm did not immediately respond to a follow-up inquiry Monday.

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