Norman H. Pine

Plaintiff Danielle Baez's 7-year slog through the courts as she sought to hold her former employer, the Burbank Unified School District, accountable for sexual harassment included two trips to the Court of Appeal. There, Pine twice prevailed for Baez in a case that ultimately vindicated Baez and disclosed the extraordinary lengths to which the school district's lawyers went in attacking the plaintiff's character. The second appellate opinion affirmed a jury's award to Baez and a big fee for her trial counsel. Baez v. Burbank Unified School District, B254852 (2nd DCA, opinion filed Jan. 25, 2016)

On the first appeal, Pine won reversal of a defense verdict following a trial that concentrated unfairly on Baez's sexual history aside from the alleged assault by a school district official, Craig Jellison. Following Pine's briefing and argument, the panel wrote, "the question of whether Jellison sexually assaulted Baez on July 26, 2006, was lost in a trial focused on Baez's [extramarital] relationship with [another man]," which prejudiced Baez. A second round in court ended in a mistrial when the defense disobeyed judicial orders to exclude evidence of Baez's sex life. At trial three, the jury found that Jellison had committed battery, false imprisonment and the intentional infliction of emotional distress and had acted with malice. The district was liable for a hostile work environment. The jurors awarded Baez $200,000.

Pine said his arguments to the appellate panel included a recounting of the defense's scorched-earth tactics, in part to justify an enormous $3.5 million fee award to Baez's trial counsel, Victor L. George. Pine's successful defense of the fee award led the panel to reject defense claims that Baez should recover no fee for the first trial because she lost it. But that was the district's fault, Pine contended, and the panel agreed. "The trial court reasonably found that Baez was entitled to recover attorney's fees for the time spent in the first trial because neither Baez nor her counsel caused the errors that led to the reversal of the judgment on appeal," the panel wrote. "Instead, the reversal was the result of the District and Jellison's noncompliance with the Evidence Code in seeking to present evidence of Baez's [extramarital] sexual relationship..."

The outcome was a spotlight on excessive ? and expensive ? defense litigation tactics that cost taxpayers much more than necessary to deal with bad acts by one school district employee against another, Pine said. It also showed lawyers that if they fight for a plaintiff in the face of unfair and reversible opposition, courts will have their backs when it comes to fees, Pine added. The appellate panel concluded by awarding Baez the costs of Pine's appeal.

— John Roemer