She'll possibly be more discreet than this.
Paul, Weiss has settled the £136m claim brought against it by a former associate, RollOnFriday understands.
The associate was a corporate lawyer in the London office of the US firm until she was sacked in 2018.
In her claim for £136 million (go big or go home) she alleged that her dismissal was due to sex discrimination and amounted to harassment or victimisation.
She said that she also suffered religious discrimination because she received fewer days of paid holiday than Jewish staff.
Paul, Weiss argued that she was actually sacked because she enrolled in a full-time PhD programme at Cambridge University without asking, against a background of allegedly poor performance at work.
Things got personal when a fellow student at Trinity College, Joseph Liptrap, attended a preliminary hearing with the associate and then began what Paul, Weiss called a "massive and unrelenting campaign of internet and email harassment" against the firm and its London co-head, David Lakhdhir.
Liptrap accused the firm on Twitter of hiring “insidious and repugnant” individuals “who *allegedly* (infer sarcasm) – bully women into crying on the job and create a toxic work environment”.
“AIRHORN!” began another tweet: “UK ladies qualified to practice NY law: do *not* consider working for @PaulWeissLLP in London. They treat women like rubbish and the work environment is toxic".
As part of his PR drive Liptrap contacted over 30 staff at Human Rights Watch to let them know that Lakhdhir was accused of sex discrimination and harassment, and emailed every single Paul, Weiss partner, too.
The female associate took a similarly nuclear approach and emailed 625 Paul Weiss staff with the subject heading, “Sex Discrimination and Harassment at Paul, Weiss”.
Stephenson Harwood acted for Paul, Weiss on the matter and the claimant and Liptrap both took aim at that firm, too. She reported two of its solicitors to the SRA while Liptrap emailed all of its lawyers to demand that the firm apologise for accusing him of defamation, and remove his tweets from its discovery bundle.
“If my requests are not met reasonably soon", he wrote, "the circumstances are going to grow far, far worse for anyone in your firm that had any part to play in this wretched string of events, the nature of which is bound to quickly become very public”.
Instead, everything went very quiet, until the Employment Tribunal confirmed to ROF this month that an outcome was reached outside of the court in 2021 which was “not a matter for public record”.
In the intervening years the claimant rose to become the director of studies in law at Newnham College, Cambridge and announced this week that she had joined the University of Oxford’s law faculty.
“This is a dream come true for me, as my own experience studying the BCL at Balliol College, Oxford was completely life changing”, she said on LinkedIn.
Neither the former associate, Liptrap, nor Paul, Weiss responded to requests for comment.
With everyone's months presumably sewn shut by NDAs, it’s not known how close she got to her £136m target, but crowdsourcing will work it out:
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