Carol M. Gillam 

Carol M. Gillam is the founder and principal of The Gillam Law Firm, PC, a two-lawyer plaintiff-side employment boutique she launched in 1994. Her advocacy for whistleblower rights and for women cracking the glass ceiling has made her a Daily Journal Top Labor and Employment Lawyer each year since 2011.

She got her bar card in 1982 but has no plan to retire. “I tried golf, and my knees don’t like tennis. I just love practicing law,” she said from her beach house on the Sea of Cortez, where she works several months each year.

Post-pandemic, Gillam had six trials over a 15-month span. “That’s a lot in employment law,” she said. “And I won ’em all, some big and some small.”

She’s still in the posttrial motions stage of the federal whistleblower case in which a jury last year awarded $1.5 million for emotional distress and reputational harm to a man who sued his employer for wrongful termination and defamation. Erhart v. BofI Holding, Inc., 3:15-cv-02287 (S.D. Cal., filed Oct. 13, 2015).

Successful cases under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are rare, Gillam pointed out, referring to the 2002 law that protects plaintiffs against corporate retaliation in fraud cases. Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Cynthia A. Bashant of San Diego is considering Gillam’s $3 million fee request and the defendant’s motion to throw out the judgment.

Meanwhile, last November, Gillam won a jury trial and a $900,000 award for a Black female pharmaceutical sales representative who spoke out about racism; the matter later settled for an undisclosed sum. The woman’s retaliation claims under the Labor Code and the Fair Employment and Housing Act prevailed over strenuous defense efforts to portray the plaintiff in a negative light. Watson v. Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., BC69676 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed April 13, 2018).

“The judge let the defense put on as many witnesses as they wished to bash my client,” Gillam said. “I hoped they’d overdo it, and they did. Later, the jurors told us that they found all the people calling a Black woman ‘aggressive’ was offensive.” Gillam also obtained fees, “a very substantial amount,” she said.

In another challenging racial harassment and retaliation case, Gilliam, in May 2023, persuaded a Los Angeles jury to award $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages for Latino warehouse workers after a white sales executive yelled at them that they were “monkeys with amnesia.” De la Cruz et al. v. Jack Nadel Inc. et al., BC697301 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed March 8, 2018).

“It was a strange comment that the jury found offensive,” Gillam said. Posttrial motions are ongoing.

—John Roemer