Michelle La Mar 

Michelle La Mar was defending an India-based conglomerate against accusations that it discriminated against non-South Asians in hiring for its U.S. operations. The plaintiffs’ attorney questioned the company’s human resources chief about an American man who had been fired.

The corporate official responded, “I know that man. We hired him back three days later,” La Mar said. Slaight v. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., 4:15-cv-01696 (N.D. Cal., filed April 14, 2015).

That exchange epitomizes her successful defense of the case, as she describes it.

“For that high of a person to know this person, it just showed how much they cared about them,” she said, meaning how much the company’s Indian managers cared about all their employees. “And they really did.”

La Mar has come to specialize in representing Indian companies in employment disputes, particularly in pattern-and-practice cases, in which the issue is not how the employer treated any particular employee, but whether the company has policies that intentionally discriminate against a category of workers. The cases often turn on circumstantial evidence, La Mar said. “Do they favor one group over another? And it’s a much easier test.”

She has had good success in defending those cases, including one settled last year in which a New York federal court rejected the plaintiffs’ claims for citizenship discrimination and ruled for the first time in the 2nd Circuit that American citizenship is not a protected category. Meyenhofer v. Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd., 1:19-cv-09349 (S.D. N.Y., filed Oct. 9, 2019).

Currently, she is defending Tata in a pattern-and-practice class action in New Jersey. Katz v. Tata Consultancy Services, 2:22-cv-07069 (D. N.J. filed Dec. & 2022).

The only one of these cases to go to trial was the first, Slaight, in 2018. The nine-person jury unanimously found that Tata did not have a pattern or practice of intentionally discriminating against non-Indians or non-South Asians.

La Mar took a counterintuitive approach to that trial. “I didn’t try to find all Americans who worked [for the company], so it looked like we were an American company,” she said. “I celebrated in the trial that we were an Indian company, and we were doing good … for the U.S.”

“We won the case because of the honesty and commitment and compassion of the staff at TCS. I didn’t try to hide them. I celebrated them.”

La Mar said she had come to know and love India and its people through a colleague from there when they were young associates. He later became Tata’s general counsel, she said.

— Don DeBenedictis