Terry said early on in her career she'd look around and wonder why women and other diverse candidates weren't being promoted to equity partner "at the same rates others were."
"So I became intensely interested in how I was going to challenge that," said Terry, a labor and employment litigator who now leads the Diversity and Inclusion Committee and Associate Development Committee at Arent Fox's LA office.
"Fortunately I'm in a firm that is also very passionate about [diversity]," she explained, noting that she was promoted to partner while on a temporary reduced workload she took on while raising three young children.
Terry said her clients - including several nationwide and international retail behemoths she can't publicly disclose - tend to share her and her firm's passion. She helps them with their internal benchmarking in their own legal groups, in addition to assessing their company diversity.
This is all in addition to her practice focusing on single- and multi-plaintiff employment litigation, advice and counsel, and class and collective actions.
As lead counsel, she achieved an outright dismissal of a national wage/hour class action against brought against long-term care services company PharMerica Corporation by delivery drivers. According to Terry, the case involved "a lot of quintessential questions of law that you see all over the news: the joint-employer issue, the wage-hour issue, the independent contractor issue." Walder v. PharMerica Inc., BC543764 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed April 25, 2014).
She said the case hinged on the fact that the plaintiff was not representative of the class. "The class itself was simply not ascertainable, and it really came down to that," she said. In the end, the plaintiff just walked away.
Prior to law school, Terry lived in Ecuador and Argentina for several years, gaining a fluency in Spanish and Latin American markets she hasn't lost. For the last decade she's represented her first-ever client Sistema de Credito Automotriz, SA de CV,a finance company for Nissan automobiles in Mexico. Her work focuses on litigation prevention and employment counseling for both the company and its U.S. affiliate, Sicrea International LLC, which markets financing packages to people who want to finance a car for friends or family in Mexico.
Terry believes that multicultural workplaces, particularly in the melting pot of California, are positive but pose "unique challenges for employers."
"A lot of these single-plaintiff cases relate to those type of issues," she said, pointing to recent disputes over employers trying to enforce English-only policies in the workplace.
- Lila Seidman
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