Philip Shawe, co-founder of TransPerfect Global Inc. Courtesy photo/Buck Ennis

The New York Law Journal's May 10, 2019 article (and its headline), concerning a complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice against TransPerfect's staffing agency for allegedly engaging in citizenship status discrimination, omits critical facts and falsely suggests that discrimination occurred “at TransPerfect,” when it plainly did not.  We write to set the record straight.

The salient facts are straightforward. TransPerfect's client (an Am Law 100 law firm) dismissed two dual citizens whom TransPerfect recruited and placed at the law firm to work as contract attorneys on a limited-duration document review project. The law firm did not provide TransPerfect with any advance notice of its decision, and it is undisputed that TransPerfect had no control over the hiring or removal decision.

After the dual citizens were dismissed without TransPerfect having been consulted, TransPerfect promptly found new placements for those individuals, all the while being well aware they were dual citizens. Given that the dual citizens had just been dismissed from the project, this was the only remedial action TransPerfect could take. Based on the directive received from its law firm client, TransPerfect also sent to a number of potential contract attorneys a single email explaining that a U.S. citizenship requirement existed for the project.

TransPerfect had no reason to know or suspect that the instructions it received were unlawful, given that the applicable statute specifically allows entities to discriminate based on citizenship status if the discrimination is required in order to comply with a law; regulation; executive order; federal, state or local government contract; or determination by the attorney general.

TransPerfect reasonably and appropriately relied on the staffing determinations made by its client, which believed, in good faith, that it was complying with the data access restrictions contained in the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (“ITAR”). Questioning the legality of a request received from a law firm client under such circumstances would be the antithesis of providing high-quality professional services to the legal community.

Moreover, a citizenship-related restriction instituted by a single law firm client, in connection with a single limited-duration document review project, cannot possibly constitute a “pattern or practice” of citizenship status discrimination, which requires a showing that unlawful discrimination “was the company's standard operating procedure–the regular rather than the unusual practice.”

TransPerfect is an international company with offices in more than 90 cities throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. Diversity is the lifeblood of its business, and it does not discriminate based on citizenship status or any other protected characteristic. To the contrary, it is and always has been committed to the highest ethical and legal standards.

TransPerfect is confident that the claims asserted by the DOJ will be dismissed, either via motion practice or at an administrative hearing, and it intends to vigorously challenge all of the allegations asserted against it, which are entirely without merit.

Accordingly, and contrary to the Law Journal's misleading headline, there is no “discrimination at TransPerfect in hiring.”

Alan Dershowitz is special counsel to TransPerfect and Daniel Turinsky, a partner at DLA Piper, is the counsel of record for TransPerfect in the DOJ Action.