Kelly M. Dermody 

For Kelly M. Dermody, this has been the year that anti-bias laws really came to life.

“It’s been a very challenging decade-plus for anti-bias practitioners to actually move cases,” she said. Major cases were hampered by limited case law interpreting new statutes and shifting interpretations of older ones, she said. But Dermody and her co-counsel brought in important settlements with large employers over the past 18 months.

“It was really gratifying and positive to see that the laws are still alive, and they still can protect people,” she said.

Dermody is the managing partner of Lieff Cabraser’s San Francisco office, and she focuses her practice on representing employees and consumers in class actions and collective litigation.

In May, she and her co-counsel reached a record-setting $215 million settlement with Goldman-Sachs over its allegedly pervasive discrimination against female associates and vice presidents in pay, promotions and performance evaluations. Chen-Oster v. Goldman Sachs, Inc., 1:10-cv-06950 (S.D.N.Y., filed Sept. 15, 2010).

The settlement in the 13-year-old case is beyond huge. If it receives final approval at an Oct. 3 hearing, Dermody says it will be one of the largest discrimination settlements in U.S. history, the single-largest gender bias settlement made in advance of a trial victory, the third-largest gender bias settlement of any kind and nearly five times larger than the next-largest gender bias class action settlement involving a Wall Street firm.

“It’s nice to feel we’re really making forward progress, not just for the client or changing things on Wall Street or in tech, but really for the law,” she said. “That’s pretty exciting.”

Beyond the courtroom impact, Dermody added, “The fact that there have been these results in the equal pay area has a modifying effect on defense strategy and defense attitudes about their liability in the cases and the seriousness with which to take the claims.”

Two other important settlements she helped achieve recently included significant programmatic or injunctive remedies in addition to dollars. In October, a court approved a $118 million class action settlement against Google over its systematic underpayment of women in violation of California’s Equal Pay Act. The search giant agreed to modify its hiring and review processes. Ellis v. Google Inc., CGC-17-561299 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Sept. 14, 2017).

She won final approval in March 2022 of a $11.5 million settlement with Kaiser Permanente over its hiring and promotion of Black employees. The deal includes innovative changes to systems and policies to ensure fair pay in the future, she said. Stewart v. Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc., CGC-21-590966 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed April 22, 2021).

Currently, Dermody is pursuing a rare, for her, single-plaintiff case for a highly regarded, Black pediatric ophthalmologist over an allegedly toxic workplace at Sutter Health. “We are in settlement talks, and I anticipate the case is settling,” she said. Nyong’o v. Sutter Health, 3:21-cv-06238 (N.D. Ca., filed Aug. 12, 2021).

— Don DeBenedictis