Shannon Liss-Riordan

BOSTON - Shannon Liss-Riordan is a workers'-rights attorney and the co-founder in 2009 of Lichten & Liss-Riordan PC. A leading legal critic of inequities in gig economy business models, she emerged from the women's movement and a job with Bella Abzug to attend Harvard Law School and to clerk for then-U.S. District Judge Nancy F. Atlas of Houston.

In early January, Liss-Riordan had Elon Musk and Twitter Inc. in her sights, following a successful case on behalf of allegedly misclassified Uber Technologies, Inc. drivers -- one settled for $8.4 million in August 2022 -- and a successful effort to keep off the Massachusetts ballot an initiative backed by Uber and DoorDash Inc. classifying ride-share and app-based drivers as independent contractors that mirrored California's Proposition 22.

"I co-founded a coalition with the Massachusetts AFL-CIO to stop it," Liss-Riordan said of the ballot measure. "Not only that, I ran for Massachusetts attorney general," coming in second in the Democratic primary to the eventual winner. "All in all, 2022 was a pretty busy year."

Musk's purchase of Twitter last year and his subsequent mass worker layoffs spurred Liss-Riordan to action. So far, she's filed four federal class actions over severance pay, notice under the WARN Act, disability discrimination claims and sex discrimination claims. The first suit filed came one day before the first round of layoffs. Cornet et al. v. Twitter Inc., 3:22-cv- 06857 (N.D. Cal., filed Nov. 3, 2022).

Also, she's filed three charges with the National Labor Relations Board over alleged violations of federal labor laws.

When Twitter responded by seeking to move the class claims to arbitration, Liss-Riordan responded with a favorite tactic: embracing the arbitration model to put pressure on the defense. "This morning, we sent Musk another one hundred arbitration demands," she said in early January.

"Elon Musk is ignoring the law, and we have really good claims. I pioneered the mass arbitration technique 15 years ago when companies thought it was clever to block class actions. It can cost them millions and millions of dollars to arbitrate individually, and if Elon Musk wants to fight these claims one by one in individual arbitration, we are ready to fight them one by one, on behalf of potentially thousands of employees if that becomes necessary. We have done it before and we are ready to do it again."

How does the mass arbitration approach work out? "Some companies have actually retreated to class actions when faced with mass arbitrations," Liss-Riordan said. "More often, when we say we want to resolve a matter through aggregated arbitrations, the defense decides to pay a class claim to get rid of us." The National Labor Relations Board claims are separate. "We have alleged that Twitter terminated employees for trying to help their co-workers," Liss-Riordan said. "Manu Cornet, the first employee to be let go on Nov. 1, was fired shortly after posting a way for employees to access their HR documents and vesting information, in case they needed them in the event of mass layoffs."

Other employees were fired after encouraging fellow workers to protest Musk's new policies, including an abrupt return-to-office policy. "We expect the NLRB will investigate further Twitter's attempt to interfere with employees attempting to advocate for one another."

Liss-Riordan relishes the combat. "I love my practice, fighting for working people when companies feel they hold all he cards -- and I can show them they don't."