Kelly M. Dermody

As chair of the firm's employment practice group, Dermody brings claims of gender and race discrimination against top Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Fortune 100 companies. She also supervises wage suppression claims against technology, healthcare and academic institutions; overtime and lost pay lawsuits for low-wage workers, IT professionals and foreign nationals working for American corporations; and ERISA claims by employees and retirees alleging pension plan abuses.

As public outcry mounted over alleged gender discrimination in the technology sector, Dermondy in late 2015 filed a gender discrimination class action on behalf of all current and former female Microsoft Corp. technical professionals. The complaint alleges that the Redmond, Washington company's common performance review, pay and promotion policies and practices disadvantage female workers in engineering, technical sales and service roles. It also claims Microsoft lacks proper accountability measures to ensure fairness, and that the company has maintained these policies despite knowing they have disparate impact on female employees.

Dermody said the lawsuit has significant differences from Ellen Pao's failed challenge to Silicon Valley venture capital leader Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers over gender bias claims. "This is a class action, not an individual lawsuit, and the allegations are not over workplace discrimination but over pay and promotions," she pointed out. But Dermody acknowledged that both have in common the theme that women are not treated fairly in the tech world.

And it's not just women, Dermody said, pointing to her role as co-lead class counsel in consolidated class action litigation on behalf of more than 64,000 employees. The far-reaching lawsuit challenged an alleged conspiracy involving Adobe Systems Inc., Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp., Intuit Inc. and others to suppress the pay of technical, creative and other salaried employees. After winning class certification, the case resolved through a series of settlements with all defendants for $435 million. That marked the largest amount ever recovered for employees alleging a conspiracy to suppress wages and the second largest recovery in an employment case of any kind in history, Dermody said.

"It is not proper to suppress wages to save money," she said, summing up the outcome, "although it is incredibly seductive for companies to do that. The message is getting out loudly."

John Roemer