Cameron W. Fox

Fox defended Google and its parent, Alphabet Inc., against a high-profile lawsuit filed by an ex-employee claiming he was unlawfully fired for writing a 10-page memo criticizing the company's diversity programs.

The action filed by software engineer James Damore, who claimed his memo included protected speech, was deemed significant and worthy of review by the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, which determined Damore's memo contained both protected and unprotected speech. The ruling said Google's termination of the engineer was based on reasons that do not violate the National Labor Relations Act.

The labor relations board deemed parts of the memo "so harmful, discriminatory and disruptive" they lost their protected speech status.

"Cases like this one are particularly challenging right now because our society has become so politically divided," Fox said. "Add that to the fact that many employers, large and small, are encouraging their employees to see the workplace as another home, as a place where they can share thoughts, emotions and impressions that don't have anything to do with work."

"In this political environment we are living in, not everyone is going to agree and it is making the workplace a more divisive environment," she added.

Fox, who co-chairs Paul Hastings' Los Angeles employment law department, is handling several sensitive matters with respect to claims coming out of the #MeToo movement that are completely unrelated to her work with Google.

New state laws limiting use of confidentiality provisions in #MeToo related settlements is based on the assumption that all companies want to keep past incidents quiet, while all plaintiffs want to see them come to light, she said.

"But that's not always the case," Fox said. "And in fact, for many employers, if there are limitations on their ability to enforce confidentiality, they are going to be naturally less likely to pay the kinds of sums in a settlement that a particular plaintiff might dearly want to have."

While the new statutes might have been written to shed light on sexual harassment, in practice the law has made settling disputes much "trickier" for plaintiffs, she said.

-- Blaise Scemama