Lynne C. Hermle

Hermle’s name is at the top of the list for national corporations facing gender harassment and discrimination claims.

The Silicon Valley Orrick partner boasts a long resume of defeating class certification and obtaining summary judgment in addition to winning high-profile jury trials, if they get that far, on behalf of industry-leading clients.

“A lot of the cases, I get hired because I’m trying them before juries pretty actively,” she said. “As the years go by, fewer people seem to be doing that.”

Hermle won a complete defense verdict for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in a high-stakes gender discrimination and retaliation suit in the venture capital industry in 2015 and followed that up with another landmark defense win for Hawthorne-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, in a suit that alleged similar claims. Eight months after the first win, Hermle garnered another defense victory in a wrongful discharge and retaliation case for SpaceX, cementing her reputation as one of the most feared employment defense attorneys in the nation.

Hermle recently defeated class certification in a national gender discrimination suit against Microsoft, whittling the potential class members down from 8,600 to three. Moussouris v. Microsoft Corp., 15CV01483 (W.D. Wash., filed Sept. 16, 2015).

She argued that Microsoft Corp. not only invested $50 million in bringing their policies up to date, it had trained staff and hired employee relations and investigations teams.

Hermle was slightly worried because courts have been granting similar class certification motions because of the #MeToo movement, but was confident that she could prove the issue was not systemic throughout the company.

Hermle said there are a lot of women working in employment defense but are not hired in lead roles as much as they should be. She looks at her mostly female associate team and wonders why the legal industry has not caught up in terms of diversity.

“I love my associate team,” she said. “They’re a bunch of badass women trial lawyers.”

— Winston Cho