Discrimination and Other Complex Employment Litigation

Weil represented Forest Laboratories, LLC and Forest Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (together, Forest), in a putative gender class and collective action brought on behalf of eleven former sales representatives, Barrett, et al. v. Forest Laboratories, Inc., et al. Forest, now known as Allergan and a subsidiary of Actavis plc, is a global pharmaceutical company. Plaintiffs are represented by leading class counsel, Sanford Heisler Kimpel, which has had prior success in bringing class claims of gender discrimination against pharmaceutical companies, including a $250 million gender discrimination verdict several years ago against pharmaceutical giant, Novartis. After having successfully narrowed the scope of the case through a motion to dismiss and/or strike, which resulted in the dismissal of several individual claims and a significant narrowing of the putative Title VII class period, Weil secured another victory in July 2015 when Judge Abrams denied Plaintiffs’ motion for equitable tolling of the statute of limitations for potential collective action members’ claims under the Equal Pay Act (EPA). The full denial of this motion significantly limited the size of the putative EPA collective as well as the potential damages arising from the EPA collective action claim.

Weil represents Sterling Jewelers in Jock v. Sterling, a class arbitration widely recognized as the largest private Title VII class action in the country, and a corresponding gender bias EEOC suit. In Jock, which is being litigated by the well-known plaintiffs’ firm Cohen Milstein, Weil successfully defeated class certification of all of the disparate treatment gender discrimination claims, substantially narrowing the scope of the remaining claims against Sterling. In late July 2017, Weil obtained a significant victory for Sterling when the Second Circuit vacated an earlier decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and remanded the case to Judge Rakoff to address whether the arbitrator in fact had the power to bind tens of thousands of absent class members who had never opted into the litigation.

Weil also secured a major victory for Sterling in the EEOC litigation by obtaining a complete dismissal on the basis that the EEOC had failed to produce any evidence demonstrating that it had complied with its Title VII pre-suit obligation of conducting a nationwide investigation of Sterling’s employment practices. This decision was subsequently overturned by the Second Circuit in September 2015, thereby reviving the EEOC’s nationwide gender bias suit. Weil petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to undo this Second Circuit decision. Weil successfully negotiated a virtually unprecedented settlement of the EEOC’s largest matter with no payment to the government being required by our client.

• We represented Merrill Lynch in a high-profile nationwide class action alleging that African-American financial advisors were discriminated against in every aspect of their employment.
• We also secured a victory in a case alleging discrimination in a “stay bonus” program adopted in connection with Merrill’s merger with Bank of America.