Kelly M. Dermody

Dermody was on her first day of work at Lieff Cabraser in 1994 when she was assigned to one of the largest gender discrimination lawsuits of the time: a class action charging that Home Depot Inc. kept women in low-paying menial jobs while giving men more chances for training, promotion and higher pay.

Although Dermody was scarcely out of UC Berkeley School of Law when the suit was launched, she played an active role in its development and became a leading spokesperson for the plaintiffs.

Just as the suit was going to trial in 1997, Home Depot settled for $87.5 million: $65 million for around 6,000 plaintiffs and $22.5 million for the attorneys. In addition, the company signed a five-year consent decree to change its practices to provide more hiring, promotion and compensation opportunities to women.

"It was a very impactful and significant injunctive relief," Dermody said. "It really changed the way that Home Depot hires and promotes women."

In the years since, Dermody has pursued similar class action discrimination cases against Abercrombie & Fitch Stores Inc., which settled for $40 million in monetary benefits and an estimated $10 million in injunctive relief; Smith Barney, which settled for $33 million; and ongoing cases against Microsoft Corp., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and KPMG US LLC.

"There is still a very persistent bias and stereotyping of women and minorities in the workplace," she said.

But Dermody's best-known recent case had nothing to do with discrimination. Starting in 2011, Dermody served as co-lead counsel in a class action accusing Adobe Systems Inc., Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp., Intuit Inc., Lucasfilm, and Pixar of conspiring to slow down their workers' wage growth.

Following the trail of a Department of Justice antitrust case against the companies, the suit accused them of secretly agreeing not to poach each other's employees through "cold-calling." The evidence included a number of private communications between the CEOs, such as an email from the head of Google promising Steve Jobs that he would fire a recruiter who had cold-called an Apple employee.

"This was designed to suppress wage growth," Dermody said. "When workers are cold-called, they get a picture of the value of labor in the real market. By stopping the cold-calling, the companies disrupted that information flow."

The companies eventually settled the case for a total of $435 million, reportedly the largest amount ever recovered for employees challenging a conspiracy to suppress wages and the second largest recovery in an employment case of any kind in history.

"The plaintiffs were the people who are producing some of the most popular products in the country," Dermody said. "I just wanted to make sure they were playing on a fair field."

— Dean Calbreath