Lowe had two long, tough employment discrimination jury trials and an arduous arbitration in 2015. And he played an advisory role while law partner Mark S. Rudy represented plaintiff Ellen Pao in her unsuccessful challenge to prominent venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers over gender bias claims in another blockbuster courtroom showdown.
For an eight-lawyer boutique, that was significant action, Lowe said. "A crazy year. We like trials, but that was a lot all at once."
Lowe's two trials had curious parallels. For a Catholic high school's head football coach fired and publicly blamed after he reported sexual hazing on his team, Lowe persuaded a Sacramento County jury to award $900,000 in compensatory damages and to find that church officials acted with malice. Before the jury could decide on punitive damages, the church settled for a total of $4 million. Cerbone v. Roman Catholic Bishop of Sacramento, 34-2013-00140297 (Sacramento Super. Ct., filed Feb. 20, 2013)
And for a blind physical therapist fired from a Bakersfield hospital, Lowe obtained a $1.9 million verdict for lost wages and emotional distress plus, again, a finding of malice that opened the door to punitives. Again the case settled - this time for an undisclosed amount — before jurors could settle on a sum. Kurtz v. Dignity Health, Mercy Hospital Bakersfield, CGC-14-537029 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Jan. 28, 2014)
"Our perception was that the defendants concluded they were looking at potential awards greater than what they agreed to in the settlements," Lowe said.
The Cerbone case was trickier than it looked, Lowe said, even though the school fired recently hired coach Christopher Cerbone and published a press release claiming that he had initiated the hazing. The case originated with co-counsel Tyler F. Clark. Aiding them was Lowe's senior litigation counsel, Erin M. Pulaski. "Their argument was that the buck stopped with [Cerbone]," Lowe said of the defense. "They took the position that the church gets accused of not being accountable, but when it acts, it also gets accused. We had to overcome their convenient excuse for blaming an outsider as fall guy. But the jury thought it was unfair to hold him accountable alone. There were lots of layers of supervision there."
The case of the physical therapist was especially satisfying, Lowe said, because plaintiff Scott Kurtz had — despite his blindness — worked for ten years with never a complaint and with high performance reviews. "Then a human resources manager saw him with a white cane and freaked out and he lost his job. It was extremely gratifying to my client to be told by a jury that he could do the job and was not a risk to patients," Lowe said. The hospital's name figured into the case, he added. "I did succumb to temptation and point out that this was no way to treat people with 'Dignity,'" he said.
— John Roemer
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