James M. Finberg 

James M. Finberg is an Altshuler Berzon LLP partner whose recent focus is on gender pay disparities — a current hot employment law topic as pay transparency laws take hold in California.

“There is a pay gap, and it’s a problem in our society,” Finberg said. He’s been working on closing the gap and on other significant employment law topics since he got his bar card in 1984. Earlier, after getting his JD at the University of Chicago Law School, he clerked for a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court.

Finberg joined Altshuler in 2007 after a lengthy stint at Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein LLP, where he and Lieff Cabraser partner Kelly M. Dermody — like Finberg, an expert on pay equity issues — worked closely together.

Altshuler and Lieff Cabraser joined forces in 2017 to address the pay gap issue head-on when Finberg and Dermody obtained a $118 million settlement with Google Inc. over claims that more than 17,000 female employees between 2013 and 2022 had lower pay and fewer career growth opportunities than their male counterparts. Ellis et al. v. Google Inc., CGC17561299 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Sept. 14, 2017).

Finberg said the settlement deal, which got final approval in October 2022, is working. “They paid out the money and, as agreed, they have retained an industrial organizational psychologist to help set salary levels based on objective job-related criteria.”

Still in progress is a similar suit against Oracle America Inc. Finberg and colleagues filed both in state court to take advantage of California’s Equal Pay Act, which forbids the use of a new hire’s prior pay levels in setting current wages. “California law says that locks in historical disparities,” Finberg said.

In the Oracle case, San Mateo County Superior Court Judge V. Raymond Swope certified a class of about 3,100 female employees who allege they were paid an average of $8,600 per year less than men in the same job codes. The judge rejected Oracle’s first decertification motion, then changed his mind and granted a renewed decertification bid on manageability grounds, stalling the case. Finberg and colleagues have appealed the decertification. Jewett et al. v. Oracle America Inc., A165726 (1st DCA, filed May 9, 2023).

Meanwhile, Finberg is refining his pay bias theories to include the pay expectation issue, which perpetuates lower pay for women by keeping the salaries they tend to seek near current levels.

“I’ll be filing new cases this year on this theory,” he said. “I find this practice exciting because it helps make the world a more fair and equitable place.”

—John Roemer