Carol M. Gillam

Gillam launched her firm in 1994 after a stint as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. Her aim—which remains unchanged—was to vindicate workers’ rights in whistleblower retaliation cases along with sexual harassment matters and glass ceiling pay parity litigation. She has served on the Ninth Circuit Credentialing Committee of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers.

She sat out part of the pandemic in Mexico. “I spent more than half the year in Baja,” she said in late May. “Now I’m going to try a road trip up the coast and to Yosemite before the crowds get insane again. All I need is Wi-fi that works in the car.”

In March 2021 she filed a whistleblower case on behalf of a veterinarian who alleges he was fired immediately after calling out his employer, a robotic surgery company, for falsifying compliance with government standards under the Animal Welfare Act for animals used in laboratory research. Curry v. Intuitive Surgical Inc., 21CV380470 (Santa Clara Co. Super. Ct., filed March 11, 2021).

Gillam’s client is Dr. Bishop Curry III, whom the complaint describes as a prominent academic veterinarian and a Black man over age 40 recruited from Boston University in 2017 to be Intuitive Surgical’s director of comparative medicine and attending veterinarian. When he found deficiencies in lab procedures and record-keeping, and when he complained to senior management about Covid risks to the company’s engineers due to lab problems with the use of cadavers, the company fired him, the complaint alleges.

It seeks damages for whistleblower retaliation; race, color, ancestry and age discrimination; hostile work environment harassment; and wrongful termination.

“I love this case,” Gillam said. “Dr. Curry was horrified by what he encountered on the job. We tried to settle the matter for a sum in the low-ish seven figures. They said we’re crazy. We’ll see.”

In a separate matter, Gillam last year defeated a defense summary judgment motion in a wrongful termination and whistleblower retaliation case for a Black female client who was a saleswoman for a major subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Watson v. Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., BC696761 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed April 13, 2018).

“When managers ignored [plaintiff Bonnie Watson’s] race,” Gillam’s complaint states, “she excelled. But when she had a white male manager who engaged in gross racial stereotyping, she was treated very differently from her white counterparts, male and female.” Watson was fired “for blatantly pretextual reasons” for complaining, the complaint says.

“This case is about the intersectionality of Black and female stereotypes,” Gillam said. “Those are powerful and difficult and annoying barriers to overcome.”

— John Roemer