Something must be in the water lately as more juries seem to be returning million dollar verdicts, but today's decision reported in the NYT,
UBS Ordered to Pay $29 Million in Sex Bias Lawsuit, has to be the largest for a single plaintiff discrimination case in some time, if not ever. Although Wall Streeter's make a lot of money, which means a lot of back pay, it's pretty clear that its treatment of employees can engender some pretty heated feelings, in this case enough to award $20.1 million in punitive damages.
The plaintiff, Laura Zubulake, a former Asian bond salesman claimed she was passed over for a manager's job in favor of a male. When she filed a complaint with the EEOC, she was fired within three months. The jury ruled for her on both her gender discrimination and retaliation claims.
According to the Newsday
story on the trial, Zubulake's lawyers argued that she should be awarded between $9.7 to 10.2 million. Why was the jury willing to award almost 3 times as that?
The Times article has some interesting possibilities. Perhaps the jury didn't like the "he was bad to everyone" defense:
Or maybe from an earlier Newsday story, it was her testimony that she was excluded from some client gatherings, including more than one baseball game and two golf outings. Or that a male superior invited her to a Boston bottomless strip club, or that another male colleague expensed a trip with a client to Scores, a Manhattan strip club. Perhaps that didn't sit well with the 6 woman, 2 man jury.
This case had gained prominence even before it went to trial as the Court had addressed a number of electronic discovery issues. See Judge Scheindlin's May, 2003
decision, one of the first opinions to set out a procedure for dealing with the whole issue of electronic discovery including the costs. And that was not the only time the Court had to address the discovery issues, as Seyfarth & Shaw noted in a
client bulletin.
And what were the discovery fights all about? Well perhaps it might have been another reason why the jury felt as it did. One of Zubulake's lawyer's was quoted in Newsday's trial story as suggesting: