Skadden’s Car Service: Abused Perk or Pretext?

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Skadden’s Car Service: Abused Perk or Pretext?

Posted Jul 8, 2008, 06:41 am CST
By Molly McDonough

At the heart of an age and sex discrimination case against Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom is a onetime litigation counsel's liberal use of a common law firm perk: the car service.

In 2005, Rita W. Gordon was fired allegedly for inappropriately charging clients for personal car service use, the New York Law Journal reports. The firm initially claimed $50,000 in car service charges. But the figure has since dropped to $23,000 over a five-year period.

That's still a hefty sum, but nothing that can't be justified, the New York lawyer argues. Indeed, Gordon claims her car-service use was no different from the use by other lawyers at the firm.

Rather, she maintains that Skadden used her car use as way "to find a nondiscriminatory excuse for terminating a 60-year-old woman and replace her with a younger man whose demeanor and conduct was more consistent with the 'macho' image of Skadden's Litigation Department."

Like at many firms, Skadden lawyers are allowed to use a car service when they work late at night or as needed for client matters. Most car use is from the firm to home. But Gordon apparently used the service during other times because she was working from home after a back injury.

"If plaintiff had not been able to work from home, she would not have been able to work the hours expected of Skadden's lawyers," Gordon alleges in the suit, the Law Journal reports.

A discovery conference in the $8 million suit is set for July 28.

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