Um, isn't that illegal (as in, gender-discrimanation)? Can any Jezelawyers comment on this?

Isn't that illegal? Why can't she sue?

Not that she'd want to go back to work there after this, but she might get some good punitive damages out of it. Pay for the future kid's college.

Maybe this is more of a corporate thing, b/c all the non-profits I have ever worked for have respected our reproductive rights and treated me & my friends pretty darn good.

Thank you for posting this. However, one small quibble: she probably wasn't laid off because she'd get pregnant again (there, she was being facetious), she was laid off because her practice group was slow, and her salary was high. That she could also get pregnant again later on was probably a small factor, but not the real one.

The real issues here are their sucky timing (seriously, PH can carry an associate another month) and the trumped-up performance based termination. Her reviews had been stellar, and they switched abruptly to cover their @sses when they decided to lay her off. Firms do this when they don't want the rest of the world to know that they are having financial difficulties - they blame lay-offs on associate performance, essentially dooming any associate so terminated if there is a soft market.

As a Biglaw fungible billing unit (albeit at an infinitely kindler and gentler Biglaw firm), kudos to her.

Ugh. Fucking disgusting.

I'm glad she had the guts to tell the world about it, though, because a lot of people would have just taken the severance and run.

As a law student, SOOOOOOOO glad none of my friends or I are working for Paul Hastings. Good for her for saying no thanks to the confidentiality agreement. I'm studying for finals right now at a T20 law school, and my female friends and I are shocked...but also not so shocked because we just finished a semester of Gender Discrimination taught by Susan Estrich.

a female lawyer was laid off by the big law firm Paul Hastings days after suffering a miscarriage because they didn't want her to get pregnant again.

I doubt firing her will lead to her infertility, but yeah, I get where you're going. Corporations suck. No, scratch that. Not having laws that sufficiently protect women sucks.

Also, fighting the good fight while you're pregnant or recovering from a birth or miscarriage just seems so beyond most people's energy reserves.

She should sue those assholes for all their worth. And is it just me, or is there like suddenly a rash of stories about pregnancy discrimination? I'm glad it seems like it's getting more attention.

This is an examply of why the *answer* is not simply more women in the positions currently held by men. The system needs to change and parenting has to be a multi-gendered responsability. Men and women raising children and running the world, not mutually exclusive.

Yeah, my maternity leave is not really 100% paid. The first two weeks there is no pay, and then there is a sliding scale of pay to complete the "6 weeks" of paid leave.

It completes my image of myself as a cog in a huge broken machine.

@ashuri2: It's REALLY hard to win these cases. With employment at will, you can be fired because your boss just doesn't like you and that is totally legal. So that's all the firm has to say was the "real" reason she got fired.
It wasn't the same situation, but I was wimpy and took the severance.

Wait, what?

How exactly does having the potential to give birth to children make you a liability? What the fuck kind of world is this?

Um, fancy firm lawyers correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Paul Hastings is the kind of "expert" in employment law that is expert at defending companies from claims, not representing aggrieved workers. I am also fairly sure I have gotten into aloud and public drunken fight with their recruitment partner over their low level of female partners.

@ashuri2: It is illegal for an ER with 15 or more EEs to : refuse to hire, fire, force a worker to leave, or take away credit for previous years service, due to pregnancy.

Also, if you've been working for Er for more than a year you are entitled to FMLA if employer does not have maternity leave

I dunno about in the States, but in Canada an employer can't even broach the topic of pregnancy in an interview muchless fire female employees for their ability to bear. Stupid.

@kungfutoday: Not trying to be rude, but how do you know that's what was going on with this firm? And couldn't that be a pretext for discrimination?

@J.D.Regent: Totally correct.

@J.D.Regent: I am also fairly sure I have gotten into aloud and public drunken fight with their recruitment partner over their low level of female partners.

Which is precisely why I love you.

@ashuri2: Of course you also have to be able to show that pregnancy was the motivating factor for the firing. That can be difficult to do.

@lkhorgan: oooh what was your LSAT score? did you make law review too?

@dirtybee has lost her orgasm: In my broken-machine experience, the same assholes who screw you over for "lost productivity" -and feel justified and good about it- are the same ones who can't figure out how to replace you with anyone who could find their asses without a spicy lunch in a closed room*. But as NotBetty says, No hugging, no learning.

*Yes, yes, another fart joke.

There is nothing that indicates that she was fired because of her pregnancy. Come on Moe.

It seems like the "big boys" in corporations like this will never cease to believe that women are just "emotional" and will let pregnancy/family get in the way of the job.
And IMHO, the women who flock to these kinds of men and aspire to be "trophy wives" just make it worse for the rest of us.

back in Mexico, my mom when she had a high level position in banking, was laid off for just plain ol' being married and having a kid.

of course, my mom was robbed of employment and forced to move both me and her to hospitality jobs in the US and granted should you peek into a bank in Mexico now, you'll see the place is chockfull of hoochies in mini skirts fresh out of high school.

What the firm did wasn't unlawful if it was a termination at will state.

Doesn't mean at all that it was right, of course.

What in the fuck?

Ooh, I have a story!!! At my first job out of college, one of my colleagues, who had been working at the company for seven years, was laid off shortly after giving birth because she needed to take more time off than was alloted for maternity leave or something like that because her son was very sick and needed to be in the neonatal ICU for awhile. The health insurance from that job was her family's sole health coverage. Oops.

It's illegal to discriminate against pregnant women.

She is no longer pregnant. Ta Da!

@lkhorgan: As someone who has worked at three law firms over the past several years and who has many friends working at many other firms, this kind of shit (and much worse) happens all the time at all kinds of firms (By which I mean sudden, negative reviews of mid-level or senior people to get them out the door - regardless of how shitty their personal situation is at the moment).

@J.D.Regent: thats funny. :-)

@blackbirdfly: Because the full story is on www.abovethelaw.com.

Please see:

x[www.reaganenvelope.com]

@kungfutoday: Ok, then I'll go read it. Thanks.

@Techguy1138: Is that supposed to be funny?

@J.D.Regent: I think I love you in a David Cassidy kind of way.

Good on her. This will not help their Vault rating... heh.

wait, i just read the link now, and it doesn't say that she was fired because she could get pregnant, she was fired a few days after her miscarriage, nothing about pregnancy being a reason behind the firing. Or am I getting something wrong here?

@noseriously: Which would mean we are ALL expendible. So sad, but thank god I'm not married (or mothered children) to one of those assholes.

@lolacat: @blackbirdfly: he had a long gray ponytail and was totally playing the "cool partner" too. somehow i think that enraged me further, false advertising or something.

@blackbirdfly: Sorry - posted too soon. When you read her letter, she mentions the high salary/billing rate. Also, you have to take into account that many, many others have been/are being laid off at PH and other law firms right now - which some firms will admit, and others will try to bury with performance-based pretexts. So, it wasn't only because she wanted to have kids - I'm sure other associates who have and don't have kids were also laid off. The heartlessness lay in the timing. The d-baggery lay in the performance pretext.

Further, law firms are sensitive to diversity, not because they believe in it, but because it is necessary for recruiting and a certain level of diversity is mandated by many high-profile clients (Wal-Mart being one). Therefore, law firms won't simply fire female associates willy-nilly for having the ability to breed. In fact, they need women in counsel and partnership roles in order to be competitive for recruiting and client development - they just don't want the ones that they do have to breed (or if they breed, to raise them).

It doesn't sound like the firm violated any laws here - from her memo, it seems like they suddenly gave her a shitty review and suggested she explore other opportunities becuase they wanted to lay off senior lawyers, but she was pregnant or became pregnant soon after that, so there was no way they could boot her while she was preggers or on maternity leave b/c she could allege that it had something to do with her pregnancy. So they took their opportunity to terminate her when she wasn't pregnant again - which, of course, is profoundly shitty on their part.

@Jezebabe: her point is that they were making layoffs and she thinks they targeted her because she was clearly trying to get pregnant and probably would be again soon. fertile women being low hanging fruit, so to speak. ew.

@NOLAgirl: You know, I FORGOT about that. My boss accidentally let it slip that, at least here in Texas, they have the right to fire you for just not liking you.

I'm going to have to agree with kungfutoday's read here. while the timing of the firing was heartless (not to mention stupid) she was not fired for having been or planning to get pregnant. she was fired because biglaw is slow right now and partners are getting nervous.

And please do not interpret this as a defense of what the firm did at all. Trust me, I am NOT a fan of biglaw but the situation is what it is...

@dirtybee has lost her orgasm: True-- in Texas you can be fired for any or no "cause" and have no recourse unless you can prove you were fired for racial, sex or age discrimination. Which is damn near impossible to do.

@CrankyOldBroad:
Of course, we're also lucky enough to get a full year of maternity leave benefits. The benefits only work out to about 40% of my regular salary, but it's a lot better than nothing.

@dirtybee has lost her orgasm:

The employer's position is that she represents a huge risk now that she's had a miscarriage. And it's TRUE - emotional distress that severe will cause anyone's productivity to plummet, as well as the productivity of those around you. The employer also contends she's likely to try again soon, and it's true! And it will mean another extensive period of downtime.

Do I agree with this practice? Depends. I would probably do this to an employee that I felt wasn't very good or was a liability anyway. Why? Because it's easy, I won't lose the lawsuit, and there are real liabilities incurred by keeping a person on. Does this happen to really valuable, beloved employees? I don't see how it's possible. We're missing her performance context.

Is it morally wrong? I'm not sure. We fire people all the time for problems at home that have a chance to manifest themselves in the workplace like this. It's the whole reason you get asked about your personal life during a job interview. This isn't really an issue specific to women, although the pregnancy context makes it unique to them.

@misssgolightly:

It's not just the big boys, I have seen female candidates weeded out for positions b/c they were not single and childless.

@blackbirdfly:
When it comes down to it the law is humorously broken.

Of course when I took the discrimination courses for my company this exact situation was brought up. They said it's not illegal now but :
1 It still stinks
2 It maybe illegal after we get sued.
3 don't be an asshole

@J.D.Regent: my reaction exactly.

generally, PH has been marked as one to watch with regards to associate lay-offs. ATL has covered biglaw lay-offs in an ongoing manner over the last year, as indicative of the recession's impact on the legal market. i'm assuming that's the context for blackbirdfly's comment.

on day 1 of 1L year, my contracts prof had us repeat back to her the following words of warning: "they can fire you for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all." over and over again until she felt we sufficiently grasped the concept of employment at will.

@ADismalScience: What kind of "problems at home" do you fire people for? What kind of personal questions do you ask in an interview? I have never been asked anything personal, ever, and would be extremely offended if I were. Also if I had any substantial choice in jobs would not choose a job that asked me personal questions in an interview.

kungfutoday: you dont' get it. reread it. you've glossed over the meaning behind the performance eval. They used that as an excuse, as countless other firms have, as the reason for dismissal. It doesn't take much analysis to understand the subtleties ...

@asketchymess: Oh dude, I know, and that's why I'm working in-house, baby! Although I'm sure it comes with all sorts of its own (and also the same) problems.

@J.D.Regent:
I wasn't trying to be "prestigious," I was trying to make a point, perhaps badly, about how this might affect PH's rep among people they may want to hire. The Susan Estich name-drop may have been gratituous in retrospect, but I just finished a semester of her telling us nothing but how hard life is going to suck when we graduate. Thus, while this should have been shocking, it was just more evidence that she was right. Sucks.

All of this makes me glad that I don't work for a big firm full of assholes. Public interest law, people. Sure, I will be eating ramen noodles for the rest of my life, but at least I don't have to put up with bullshit like this.

@J.D.Regent: Word. In canada it is illegal to ask personal questions during interviews, I am sure this is true in many states as well

@J.D.Regent: Every female summer associate has to have her token lunches with the "Women" (purposefully capitalized) of the firm. I lunched with the 1st female partner, the highest ranking lesbian, the young mother-partner/sr. associate, and the rainmaker. Generally, it is just a persona that the firm uses to market.

Like the grey-haired pony-tail who does big-time pro-bono work.

They never introduce you to the bitter, alchoholic divorcees with fertility problems, do they?

i'm so torn - i love nothing more than seeing a big law firm exposed for being the heartless and profit-worshipping that it is, but the more the market for associates drops with this economy the more previously thrilled-to-do-the-devil's-bidding law school graduates will be competing with me for the nonprofit law jobs.

not that i'm bitter about law school and one exam away from graduation or anything...

@lolacat(ΩΜ): Haha! No, they're usually not on the recruitment committee.

BTW, new lawyers-to-be, I work for a great firm now. Not everyone is a bad guy.

@lolacat(ΩΜ):Sadly, at least the PH associate got a job in the first place. It surprises (frightens?) me that many of