Share
A Charlotte attorney is suing the law firm where she used to work, saying her colleagues discriminated against and eventually fired her because of her race.
Venus Yvette Springs filed the complaint last month in Mecklenburg Superior Court against Mayer Brown, a Chicago firm with 1,800 lawyers worldwide. She was fired from the firm's Charlotte office in May 2008, a few months after a supervisor told her she did an “outstanding job” and would make partner soon – and was replaced with a white attorney, the suit alleges.
Mayer Brown said in a statement Tuesday that Springs' claims “have no merit.”
“We will defend ourselves vigorously in this matter,” it said, declining to comment further on personnel matters or pending litigation.
Springs and her attorney did not return phone calls.
Part of the suit cites Springs' claim that the firm used her as a “marketing tool,” sending her to minority lawyer functions and other events. She was hired, she said, “in whole or in part, because the Charlotte office needed to increase its number of African American attorneys, as evidenced in part by (a supervisor's) year-end performance report, when he brags that one of his 2007 accomplishments was to hire an African American and two women, a double counting of Ms. Springs for both protected categories,” the suit says.
Mayer Brown fired Springs in May 2008, saying clients and partners had lost confidence in her, and gave her until September to finish her work and look for another job, the lawsuit says. After she left, it says, the firm hired at least three white attorneys in the real estate practice group.
Her firing came as the recession led local and national law firms to cut the ranks of employees. By spring 2008, at least four large Charlotte firms had cut staff or threatened to do so, and a fifth had rescinded job offers.
Race-related workplace complaints handled by the federal government were rising at the time, too, partly because workplaces had become more diverse, and partly because the recession had led to more layoffs and, as a result, more complaints.
Last fiscal year, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 33,937 complaints about race discrimination, an increase of 11 percent from the year before, agency statistics show.
At Mecklenburg law firms, diversity has been a priority for the last decade, said John Lassiter, president of legal recruiter Carolina Legal Staffing. The Mecklenburg Bar hired a diversity coordinator about a year ago and has since organized a number of programs to attract and retain minorities, targeting middle- and high-school students interested in practicing law and encouraging law firms to establish their own diversity committees, for instance, he said.
Law firms' clients are becoming increasingly diverse, too, so “there's economic pressure, and I think there's a sense of personal responsibility driving the efforts to have a practice that reflects the community we serve,” said Lassiter, a Charlotte City Council member who is running for mayor.
Still, it's a challenge. The best law schools have just a small pool of highly qualified candidates, so there's a competition among firms for the best, he said. And some of the progress that firms made in the last few years has been wiped away with the recession.
“I've not seen data, but like inventory, last in, first out,” he said. “I know firms are struggling with that.”
In Springs' lawsuit, she alleges that she was the only woman in her practice group and one of three black attorneys in the Charlotte office when she was hired. Now, only one of the office's 40 attorneys is black, the suit says.
The complaint says she was hired as an associate in the firm's real estate practice group in July 2007, after graduating magna cum laude from Duke Law School and working at a major national law firm.
Partners at Mayer Brown often praised Springs, and in March 2008, her supervisor told her he would make her partner in 2009 or 2010, the lawsuit says. Still, Springs alleges, she was assigned to an office away from her peers, refused clerical and paralegal help and training and excluded from client lunches, among other complaints, the suit says.
Eventually, she was denied a bonus when the firm did not credit her pro-bono work toward the hours needed for a bonus, and supervisors told her she could no longer work from home after school hours to care for her children – both violations of commitments the firm made when it hired Springs, the suit says.
Springs left the firm last September and has been unable to find a comparable position, the suit says. She has suffered emotional distress and is asking for a jury trial and damages, the lawsuit says.
Kirsten Valle: 704-358-5248
