Lori E. Andrus

Even as a high-powered litigator who co-founded a thriving law firm, Andrus has felt the sting of gender stereotypes. When arriving for trial, she is often mistaken for the court reporter. Judges direct their remarks to her male colleagues, not realizing that she is the person in charge.

"Overcoming those stereotypes is important if you want to be an effective advocate," she said. "I do my best to confront the stereotypes without being disrespectful to the person who has made the miscalculation, but it's challenging."

Since graduating with honors from the Duke University School of Law in 1999, Andrus has spent much of her time on product liability cases, ranging from nationwide class actions involving birth control treatments and heart devices to a $45 million settlement in her native Louisiana where she represented crawfish farmers suing pesticide makers.

But roughly a third of her caseload involves employment law, including one case that resonates with her own experiences: representing 300 female attorneys at Farmers Insurance Group who said they received lower compensation and fewer raises and promotions than their male counterparts.

Over the past year, Andrus and her firm spent more than 2,000 hours on the case.

By December, the class action gained a conditional certification showing that the plaintiffs were similarly situated. In most cases, the next step would have been a long period of discovery and then a decertification challenge from the defense, arguing that even if there were similarities between the class members, they weren't similar enough.

"Over the past few years, companies have become very adept at arguing that each person in the class needs to be looked at individually," Andrus said.

But after a few hard-fought battles over discovery, Farmers decided to settle within months of the conditional certification. It eventually agreed to pay $4 million to the plaintiffs; hire an outside consultant to help revise its compensation and promotion policies; and conduct annual reviews for at least three years to measure its progress in closing the wage gap.

Andrus, who said Farmers has been "wonderful" since settling, added this type of outcome could become more common through revisions to the state's Fair Pay Act that took effect in January.

"Although many company executives stick their heads in the sand when it comes to pay inequity, ignoring the problem only opens companies up to litigation..." she wrote in the June edition of Trial Magazine. "Even if companies aren't doing anything intentionally to perpetuate that (wage) gap, they're still allowing it to persist."

— Dean Calbreath