Kelly M. Dermody

Employment & Civil Rights Class & Collective Litigation

In what she describes as perhaps the most impactful case of her career, Dermody achieved a $1.5 billion victory for “one of the most, if not the most, economically deprived populations in America.”

Working with the Equal Justice Society, she obtained class certification and an injunction requiring the U.S. Treasury to send people in jails and prisons the same $1,200 stimulus payments everyone else in the country had received. The October 2020 victory was life-changing for incarcerated people and their families, Dermody said. Scholl v. Mnuchin, 4:20-cv-05309 (N.D., Cal., filed Aug. 1, 2020).

“I feel extremely proud of our clients for coming forward and really, really happy that we did the case,” she said.

Dermody more often represents people discriminated against by their employers. For instance, she is scheduled to go to trial this summer in a gender discrimination class action against Goldman Sachs. The 12-year-old case has gone through five judges. Chen-Oster v. Goldman Sachs Inc., 1:10-cv-06950 (S.D.N.Y., filed Sept. 15, 2010).

In 2019, she obtained a $54.5 million class-action settlement from Duke University and the University of North Carolina over their agreement not to hire one another’s medical school faculty. Seaman v. Duke University, 1:15-cv-00462 (M.D. N.C., filed June 9, 2015).

“In the wage suppression, no hiring, no-poach cases, there’s just a wild west in how companies think of their workforces,” Dermody said, with executives reaching agreements like Duke’s just on a handshake. “They don’t think anything of it. It’s like a perk of being in the C-suite.”

She also sometimes represents single plaintiffs, such as a current case against the prestigious Branson School in Marin County on behalf of a pediatrician who was sexually abused when she was a student there.

Since August, Dermody has also been doing double duty as the chair of the ABA Labor & Employment Section. This spring, she has attended eight in-person educational programs put on by section committees. “It’s really interesting to hear lawyers in practice parts of the labor and employment world talk about cutting-edge issues,” she said.

– Don DeBenedictis