Chapter Seven

“The judges wouldn’t touch [the defense counsel] with a ten-foot pole. We asked that he be sanctioned. We asked for judgments by default. Had I been late one time, they’d have kicked it out: ‘You lose.’ With him? Nooo. Gave him all the time he needed.”

“I took it as though they were telling me straight up, and let me be candid, ‘Nigger, I’m not going to destroy his career for you. Okay, he doesn’t follow civil rules of civil procedure. I’m not going to do it for you. I’m not going to sanction him. I’m not going to do one damn thing.’ And they didn’t. I said, ‘Okay.’ And believe me, by law, we were right every time and on the money.”

“You know, if it wasn’t for my wife and my children, I’d have did like this [mimes shooting himself in the head]. Because I lost everything, you know, and given the fact that, like I said, I’ve never been arrested for anything, I’m thinking the law exists for everybody. You know how they say it’s, ‘justice?’ It’s ‘just us.’ Not justice for all. . . .’Just us.'”

“It was, you know, pretty clear…[Mr. Williams made] cracks…to supervisors about…what was it? ‘From such and such a location I can see you in my gun sights.’ It’s like, okay, ‘Goodbye.’”

“I must have had about six or seven supervisors [under my supervision]. And I think I probably I had about four supervisors who just happened to be qualified African American supervisors. And it wasn’t that I was specifically going out looking for African American supervisors. I hired the people that were best qualified. And so then I was accused by my director of hiring too many African Americans in my department and, like I said, once I got my team organized and that’s when we began to really start pulling things together and we all started meeting our goals.”

“And so and I’m telling my director, you know, ‘Hey, this person is not doing this. This person’s not doing that’…But she does not support me in correcting them…So there was one particular supervisor who, who made it very clear that she was not going to report to a black woman…She even called me a black ‘B’ [bitch]…You know, I’m telling her all this stuff…But well, she’s not supporting, my director is not supporting me at all.”

“I have a strong recollection of her, and she’s somebody who I got a very quickly, got a sense of being a quality person who I’m sure— I was sure at that time and still am— you know, was good at her job and was somebody who seemed to me like a quality employee who gave me an explanation of how things happened to her that, I’m sure, based on my recollection now, involved the subtle kind of racial discrimination that you see a lot in the workplace.”

“I am pretty sure that Annie Daley’s supervisors and all the people in that line— because there were some individual defendants in that case, too— um, felt pretty strongly that everything they had done was absolutely kosher. And Annie did not have a case. She had not been discriminated against. Uh and, my recollection is that the in-house lawyers supported that as well— both the lawyer and his boss…And then I took her deposition, and I didn’t think she was a very persuasive person in deposition…She came across as rigid and sort of bitchy.”

“I was hoping to let them know that this was something that they could not just continue to do to people. To let them know that they were being put on notice. To get justice and then, of course, after that, to get some sort of compensation…You can try to prevent people from you know from mistreating people…But you can’t make them not be racist, but you can make them feel it if they choose to be.”

“I went [to the company’s internal EEO office], and of course they said they were going to investigate, but how do you investigate yourself?…There’s not an outside [agency] doing it. [The employer is] doing it. So then I did go to EEOC and filed a complaint, and then that’s when they gave me the letter to sue.”

“I mean, I really did go [to the state Department of Human Rights] naively,thinking that they were going to do what I thought was their mission, and that was to protect the rights, your civil rights. And what I found is that consistently they don’t do that…In fact, I just wrote a letter to ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] about the Department of Human Rights and the fact that they don’t accept evidence that the victim wants to present to them…They don’t return calls. I had an investigator who was really rude to me on the phone [and] did not interview me at all before having the fact-finding conference.”

“I got another letter from EEO saying ‘The decision we rendered was erroneous but you have a right to go to federal court.’ If the decision was erroneous, then why don’t you adjudicate and grant me the things I asked, like my promotions and my back pay? And they didn’t.”

“The company didn’t want to really settle. . . . And eventually . . . I don’t remember why, but the judge asked if I would step out. My assumption is that the other side was not being reasonable . . . and I guess, what the judge wanted to say, he didn’t want to say in front of me. I don’t know, but it got to the point that he was just doing it between the attorneys.”

“He thought Judge Klein was a pretty good judge. ‘One of the best out there,’ that’s what he said…We had our case, they had their case, and she ruled against me, and Mr. Morgan responded by saying, “She made her decision based on their summary judgment. She totally ignored ours.”

“I stood up there before the judge, and he said something way over my head, and, man, I said, ‘What?’…He didn’t take time for me to really get an understanding of what they were doing.”

“Specifically in light of Oliver’s budding expertise in file reviews, his position could have been structured to make him a specialist in that area. In addition, the position could have been tailored so he would provide information to a senior permit advisor, therefore eliminating public contact. Oliver could have become more involved in compliance evaluation. In short, as far as Jackman, his boss and chief of the section where Oliver was employed, had testified, Oliver’s disability could have been accommodated. Now that’s the proof right here, that they could have done it.”

“Excuse my language, [the judge] was a dick. He was a real prick, you know. I mean, you could tell. I mean, he was just so prejudicial against my attorney.”

“They brought that affirmative action/EEO guy on as a, to take a deposition…[and later] he says, ‘I work for the guy; what do you want me to do?’ You know? So [in the deposition] he says, ‘Oh, I didn’t see anything.’ But he used to come into my office and say, ‘Oh that was shameless what he said to you.'”

“The thing that upset me the most were the people that I thought were there— that I knew, that I personally knew and liked and I truly believe liked me, that I felt that were there to help me, turned their back on me like I had the plague, like I was nobody. That was probably the cruelest thing out of it all.”

LS: “They brought this witness in [who said] I was throwing a fit and this and that [scoffs]…”

LBN: “So they brought a witness and you had no memory of this person?”

LS: “Person, incident, anything. Another one too. This conductor [who said] . . . that I was feeling him up in the elevator and I was in some slinky dress. I don’t even own slinky dresses and I certainly don’t bring ’em [to work] . . . I’m a grip on a locomotive! If I’m in Reno, I’m on a train. I came in on the engine, not in the dining car. You know what I mean?”

LBN: “Right. So they brought in witnesses that were just surprises to you?”

LS: “Yes. Friggin’ lies. Bold-faced lies.”

“I was on the top of a locomotive washing, you know. We had to clean the roofs because all the soot get up there. And what happened was the supervisor. . . walked back and says, ‘I heard Franklin mumble a threat to me.’ Mind you, have you ever heard a locomotive run? . . . It all came out in court.”

“We do not discriminate. We do not discriminate for many reasons. First of all, it’s against the law. Secondly, it’s immoral. And third, we want diversity. The communities that we represent are all diverse. I mean we have substantial minority populations and we attempted to recruit women before anybody else was doing it and it just galls me when we’re accused of doing things that we didn’t do.”

“I think most employment and discrimination, if it’s race or gender, most of those cases at the end of the day, it would be overstating it to call them bogus, but generally the decisions I don’t think have anything to do with race or gender, but oftentimes with personality or perceived, you know, view of the applicant.”

“In general, we get a lot of people that don’t really have good understanding of what the basis for, you know, everybody’s got their own definition of discrimination, harassment. As a consequence of that, I developed training courses not only for managers and employees, but basically I’m saying, “Let’s understand what the city wrote as a definition of discrimination, harassment and what our obligations are and move along.”

“The plaintiff’s goal, in my somewhat cynical opinion, was to get money. I think that the plaintiff perceived that the organization would attempt to resolve the case fairly quickly… I think in many, many employment discrimination cases— and this comes from a defense lawyer’s standpoint— the individual does not sincerely believe they were
discriminated against.”

“Then there are certain people that are just built to be plaintiffs in employment cases. I had one case where a woman on her first day in the office went during her lunch break to buy a little journal which she titled, ‘Journal of Discrimination, Harassment, Retaliation.’ First day, first day of work.”

“One thing that’s interesting is that sometimes you see the same problem that caused the employment difficulty sort of surface in the course of the litigation itself. For instance, you know, the charging party who was fired for tardiness and absenteeism who fails to show up for their fact- finding conference at HR or is a half an hour late or something.”

“It’s not that easy to get fired [by the state] or even disciplined in a lot of the agencies. And it seemed to me that a lot of people sued sort of on the basis of, ‘I never had to do that before, why do I have to do it now?’ [Employees] get a new supervisor and all of a sudden the ways that they were doing things before were not being accepted, and mostly they weren’t very good employees. And many, many times I find that they are not mentally ill, exactly, but certainly resistant to any sort of change or any sort of direction. Somebody’s been leaving them alone for a while because of this resistance to supervision, and then they change supervisors. You wouldn’t believe how many times that is the pattern, and the new supervisor says, ‘Well, wait a minute, you know, you’re not doing the work, your work isn’t good, and what’s the story here?’ And they start the progressive discipline and then end up firing them.”

“Most of the people that bring complaints in here, I’m saying 3, 4, 5% of the workforce, we’re not talking about the smartest, you know, nails in the box or anything. These are folks that sometimes they have attitude and/or conduct and/or behavioral problems. Sometimes they mix discrimination and stuff. They try and mask their performance issues.”

“What I see are cases that are either, that [laughing] the office romance gone awry, where everything was going great, and it was all, you know consensual for three years until they didn’t get the promotion they wanted. Then all of a sudden it’s been coerced the whole time, and you go through and you get their diary and you get their notes, and it’s just ridiculous.”

“When people say, ‘I want to be treated fairly,’ it means . . . “I want to be treated fairly as I perceive fairness.” And a lot of what happens in these cases is people don’t think they’ve been treated fairly . . . and they go to a [plaintiff’s] lawyer and the lawyer says, “I got to have a hook because fairness is not a legal issue.” So then they find race or something like that.”

“In the vast majority of cases, people legitimately file these things…[Lawsuits] are not pleasant to go through. [Plaintiffs] believe they have not been treated fairly. Now whether race actually plays a role or gender actually plays a role, I think is true in a lot fewer cases. [But]…one thing that happens in litigation is that people become entrenched in their positions, and whether they believe it or not at the beginning, by the time you get to trial, they believe with all their heart and their soul and their mind that they have been discriminated against, because that unfairness has now been successfully, in their own minds, transmuted into sex discrimination or race discrimination. Because otherwise, “Why was I treated this way? It couldn’t be because of me. It couldn’t be because I did something wrong, because I don’t believe I did. So it must be race. It must be my sex. It must be my religion.”

“I think [plaintiffs’ attorneys] owe it to the clients to say . . .’I make my money representing people like you suing companies . . . for this type of thing. If you ask me to rank your case, you know, on a scale of one hundred. . . with one hundred the best and one the worst, you’re at five. You’re down at the bottom, and if you want to pursue it, it’s your privilege. I don’t think it’s a very good case. I think you’ll be disappointed at the end of the day.’ I don’t think there [are] enough [plaintiffs’ lawyers] who say that to clients…I think the attitude is much more of…’I probably can, you know, get something for it, and I’ll get [my client] something, and I’ll get something just to make it go away,’ as opposed to, ‘This person really has a legitimate grievance.’ …Lawyers, I think, are more of a problem often than the clients because the lawyers should know better.”

“If there is any chance of the person staying there and sort of resuming a normal working relationship, it not only has to happen before there’s an EEOC charge, 90- plus percent of the time it has to happen before the employer even receives the demand letter from a lawyer. . . . Look, you bring a lawyer into the situation, and they’re going to get defensive, they’re going to go to their lawyers as a buffer between you and the person who’s making the decision.. . . If you’ve been a good employee . . . you have kind of a store of goodwill that you can use. The minute you bring in the lawyer, the lawyer doesn’t have that goodwill.”

“If there is any chance of the person staying there and sort of resuming a normal working relationship, it not only has to happen before there’s an EEOC charge, 90- plus percent of the time it has to happen before the employer even receives the demand letter from a lawyer. . . . Look, you bring a lawyer into the situation, and they’re going to get defensive, they’re going to go to their lawyers as a buffer between you and the person who’s making the decision.. . . If you’ve been a good employee . . . you have kind of a store of goodwill that you can use. The minute you bring in the lawyer, the lawyer doesn’t have that goodwill.”

“The company was represented by a very good firm, and a very good lawyer said, “We’ll undertake to investigate.” And my supposition was when you get high quality legal counsel on the defense side, and you go out and investigate, you’re going to see the problem . . . I remember being appalled . . . that the investigation was really an exercise in building a defense. . . . I guess the point comes in every case where the management has to decide, “Are we going to circle the wagons and try to protect this person, or are we going to get the facts on the table and, if we have a problem, fix it?”. . . I thought that she and that law firm would be more professional.”

“In fact, at one point I think I got about a $28,000 fee award just because of the discovery nonsense. . . . It was all strategic. All I needed were the employee benefit plans, so I could say these two plans are different and this is what she is entitled to. . . . They wouldn’t produce it. . . . But it’s like every case with them. . . . It’s just nutty. . . . They must go out and present themselves to clients by saying, “You’re gonna pay us an absolute fortune. And if that’s what you want to do, then we’re your law firm.”

“All defense lawyers, especially…large companies…represented by [large law firms] filed summary judgments whether they had merit or not…because many plaintiffs…don’t put a lot of investment in their cases. They take the case and then they sit on them. The filing of the summary judgment motion tells them that they’ve got basically forty-five days to take whatever depositions and other things they want to take. If they’re like most plaintiffs’ lawyers in the region, they’re inundated with other cases. So they’ll push for an early mediation, because there is a summary judgment hanging over their heads…They’re inclined to just get rid of the case…I have been doing defense work exclusively now for several years, and I can’t think of a single case that I haven’t filed a summary judgment motion.”