Photo illustration: Jason Doiy/ALM

Let's call it the "Discovery Order Heard Around the Big Law World."

Ruling from the bench on Thursday, Washington, D.C. U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss required Jones Day to provide salary information for every associate nationwide who worked at the firm from 2012 to 2018 to lawyers for women attorneys who are pursuing a gender discrimination lawsuit against the firm. The firm had sought to limit what it had to hand over to data from 2016 to 2018 for its New York, Atlanta and California offices. 

The ruling, it's safe to say, has been getting more attention than your run-of-the-mill discovery order.

I present Exhibit A: The screenshot above from The American Lawyer's tweet promoting a story on Moss's ruling. That "retweet" activity you see is orders of magnitude greater than any other post our flagship business of law publication has made on Twitter this year—a year when, I need not say, there's been no shortage of news affecting the legal industry.

I know the Am Law Twitter post doesn't have a "Kanye's running for president" level of virality to it, but for our little world, this is something. 

And it's something, because this story has everything.

The lawsuit is about a vital and prescient topic: Gender equity in law firms.

The plaintiffs firm, Sanford Heisler Sharp, has been a thorn in the side of multiple Big Law firms, having sued Morrison & Foerster and Ogletree Deakins, among others, and having settled cases against Chadbourne & Parke (now Norton Rose Fulbright), Proskauer Rose and the now-defunct Sedgwick firm.

The law firm defendant, Jones Day, has successfully brandished its "One Firm Woldwide" branding and its conduit to the halls of power in Washington to develop a unique sort of cachet. Jones Day holds out its "black box" compensation system as a cultural touchstone and a recruiting tool. Keeping who makes what a closely held secret has been essential to that "One Firm" culture, Jones Day lawyers will tell you.

All that makes for a disproportionate industry interest in a cache of Jones Day associate salary data. 

A representative of the firm declined to comment Friday.

"This could have been a run-of-the-mill exchange of discovery," said Kate Mueting, the co-chair of Sanford Heisler's Title VII practice group, one of the lead lawyers on the Jones Day case. She said most employers turn over the sort of compensation data Jones Day fought to hold onto "fairly quickly and easily, because it is so clearly relevant" in pay equity cases. 

"It is not newsworthy that Jones Day has to turn over this data. What is newsworthy is that Jones Day fought so hard to hide it," she said. "We look forward to seeing what they've been trying to hide."

As The American Lawyer story made clear, the raw data that Moss gave the plaintiffs access to won't necessarily see the light of day in any fulsome way. But the number-crunching that experts in the case do with that salary data is likely to surface in future filings should the case move forward.

All that's bound to make the legal fight between the firm and the women attorneys who used to work for Jones Day more heated. Moss has already turned back one Jones Day bid for sanctions against the plaintiffs, and things would seem to be even more contentious now that plaintiffs have pried a crack into Jones Day's black box. 

Will the result of that crack look like something out of Greek myth? Or will industry watchers be left with a scene more like Geraldo Rivera's trip to Al Capone's vaults? That I can't tell you. But I can tell you this much: Before now, I've never seen a discovery order inspire this many retweets or twisted metaphors.