Stacy Y. North 

Stacy Y. North cofounded the five-attorney plaintiff-side boutique Berman North LLP in 2019 to focus on whistleblower retaliation, wrongful termination, wage and hour and Equal Pay Act violation cases.

She occasionally does a little defense work. “I’m married to a serial entrepreneur, so I have a soft spot for founders and startups,” North said. Before launching her own firm, she spent a dozen years at Pierce & Shearer LLP, where she honed her craft.

“I greatly appreciate the excellent mentoring I got from Andrew Pierce and Scott Berman,” she said. She and Berman decided to hang their shingle because “I was ready for autonomy. I had ideas about how to run a firm that I was eager to implement.”

A key plan: “I wanted to start with the ability for us to work remotely.” Berman North has offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco for meeting clients and conducting depositions, but the lawyers mostly work from home. One is based in Oregon.

“I’d been moving toward a remote work model for several years,” said North, whose home office is in Woodside. “I used video conferencing when available and went as paperless as possible. I found that it is rarely necessary to have a piece of paper in your hand.”

North recently obtained a high seven-figure settlement in a pre-litigation mediation on behalf of a senior executive claiming whistleblower retaliation by the large pharmaceutical company where he’d worked. “This worked very well,” North said. “We felt very strongly about this case, and we were prepared to take it to trial. The facts were very much on our side.”

She made that clear in a demand letter and got a favorable response. “I’m overjoyed when I get a reply from experienced and knowledgeable counsel, and that’s what happened here. My client did everything you’d hope from someone in his position: he recognized a questionable practice and escalated his reporting from his immediate superior up the chain. Eventually, they terminated him after decades of his working there. We were able to resolve things without filing suit.”

Things have gone less smoothly in another whistleblower retaliation case. North’s client is a former vice president at a pharmaceutical company who alleges he was fired for opposing fraudulent marketing schemes. Hilton v. Ascendis Pharma Inc., 21CV377877 (S. Clara Co. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 18, 2021).

“This one has been pending for two years, and it appears the other side is pretending there is no litigation,” she said. “We have gotten discovery sanctions and we hope to get a trial date for early next year. This case is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the one we settled in pretrial mediation.”

—John Roemer