Scott A. Berman 

Scott A. Berman cofounded Berman North LLP with law partner Stacy Y. North in 2018. The firm focuses on wrongful termination, discrimination and retaliation, wage and hour violations, misclassification and PAGA matters. They represent individuals, business owners and companies.

There’s plenty to do. More than 151,000 tech workers nationwide have been the target of mass job cuts through the end of June, according to one tracking service. “We have a lot of work from the layoffs,” Berman said. “Checking severance agreements for fairness, for example. People who are on protected status, such as pregnancy or medical leave, get swept into layoffs that companies sometimes try to use as cover to get rid of those they consider undesirables.”

At least three such matters have arisen lately. “It’s discrimination, and if challenged, employers have to justify why they laid off one worker and not another. It keeps our phone ringing.”

In one recent case, Berman represented a physician who worked for a company that made COVID-19 tests. Along with his salary, the doctor was promised stock options — but the company failed to pay the salary and did not issue the options. When the doctor complained, he was fired. Soon after that, the demand for the tests surged and the company’s value increased, making the missing options much more valuable.

“So he came to us,” said Berman, who declined to identify the parties. He sued on the doctor’s behalf for failure to pay wages, PAGA penalties, retaliation and wrongful termination. “We went to mediation and settled for a significant sum. It was a good result.”

In an ongoing confidential arbitration, Berman represents an employee who vested in and exercised a substantial number of stock options and then left the company. The company then purported to repurchase the exercised shares for what it claimed was a fair market value of zero. When the company went public eight months later, its shares rose to a point where the former employee would have received up to $10 million.

“These are real, white-hot cases,” Berman said. “The clients were clearly wronged. Plaintiff work like this is the most satisfying part of my job.”

— John Roemer