Anne B. Shaver 

Anne B. Shaver co-leads her firm’s team that represents the current and former women executives at Goldman Sachs who, in May, won a monumental $215 million settlement against the giant banking firm because of years of systemic gender discrimination. Chen-Oster v. Goldman Sachs, 1:10-cv-06950 (S.D. N.Y., filed Sept. 9, 2010).

When the case was filed in 2010, Shaver was still a junior associate at Lieff Cabraser, having been admitted only two years before. So for her, the settlement “definitely feels like the end of an era.”

She was reminded of just how far her career had progressed when several months ago, in preparation for trial, she had to read through the transcript of the very first deposition she ever took, which was of a high-ranking Goldman executive. “So I had to read this horrible transcript of my first deposition. It was pretty funny,” Shaver said. “It wasn’t horrible, actually.”

She also made her first courtroom argument in the Goldman case, a discovery motion. Afterward, her senior partner told her to work on her replies.

But Shaver said her relative inexperience might have helped the case in some ways. About a year after it was filed, the Supreme Court upended class action litigation with its Walmart v. Dukes decision. “I didn’t have to unlearn decades of the way I had been doing things,” she said. “I think having that fresh perspective … was an advantage.”

The new Goldman settlement she and her colleagues obtained breaks records, according to Lieff Cabraser. It is one of the largest discrimination settlements in U.S. history and about five times larger than the next-largest gender bias class action settlement involving a Wall Street firm.

How much any of the 2,700 class members will receive depends on many factors, but some of them “are going to do quite well,” Shaver said.

Shaver also co-leads the team that in October won a $118 million settlement for 11,000 current and former female Google workers in California who sued the search giant under the state’s Equal Pay Act. In the settlement, the company agreed to make substantial changes, including not basing new hires’ pay on their previous salaries. Ellis v. Google Inc., CGC-17-561299 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Sept. 14, 2017).

Some other cases haven’t been going as well. She represents fast-food employees suing McDonald’s, Little Caesar’s, Domino’s and Jimmy Johns over clauses in franchisees’ agreements that prohibit them from hiring workers from competing stores in the same chain. Similar “no-poach” lawsuits have succeeded, she said, but in the franchise setting, “the courts have been inclined to apply a very different standard of antitrust law.”

But she has hope. In March, the oral argument before the 7th Circuit in the case against McDonald’s seemed promising. “We’re actually optimistic that we’re going to get a reversal,” she said. Deslandes v. McDonald’s USA, LLC, 22-2333 (7th Circ., filed July 27, 2022).

— Don DeBenedictis