As young lawyers at Ahmad, Zavitsanos, Anaipakos, Alavi & Mensing, Neal Sarkar, Jason McManis and Jordan Warshauer are no strangers to the courtroom.
Getting associates in the courtroom as soon and as often as possible is how leaders at Houston-based AZA attract some of the brightest young talent to their litigation boutique.
“We want our young people being aggressive and taking initiative,” AZA founding partner John Zavitsanos recently told The Texas Lawbook. “We do not want them sitting there like a potted plant.”
Sarkar, McManis and Warshauer will get to reach a new milestone in their legal careers Tuesday morning, when they will try a case for the first time as members of an associate-only trial team. The seven-day bench trial will take place before Harris County District Judge Cory Sepolio.
They’ll face a formidable opponent: Equinor US Operations, known until last year as an arm of Norwegian oil giant Statoil. Representing Equinor are partners Kate Skagerberg and Fields Alexander of Beck Redden, a well-respected rival trial boutique located just 25 floors up from AZA in downtown Houston’s LyondellBasell Tower.
But the AZA associates believe they have a strong case. They represent James Meek, a former Equinor employee in his early sixties who says the company terminated him in 2017 because of his age while favoring less experienced, less qualified, younger employees. He was 59 at the time of the termination.
Attempts to set up an interview with Skagerberg and Alexander have been unsuccessful, but they are expected to argue at trial that Meek’s termination was simply an unfortunate result of a corporate restructuring that became necessary after the oil price crash of 2014.
In court filings, Equinor argues that the decision to eliminate Meek’s role was made in good faith after seeking legal advice. Equinor says it also retained an employment law specialist to “ensure there was no unintended impermissible impact on any protected employment group, including employees over 40 years of age.”
Sarkar says evidence produced in discovery proves otherwise.
“As we learned through discovery, the company has an almost singular focus on replacing older employees with younger employees,” he said.
According to the lawsuit, Meek was a “high-performing, loyal” Statoil employee for 15 years with more than 35 years of experience in the oil field at the time of his August 2017 termination. Before leaders at Equinor terminated Meek, the lawsuit says, they demoted him in March 2017 from a vice president position to a manager-level position.
Meek was responsible for business development and strategy for commercial, land, government and land administration for the company’s North American projects. For two years, he served a similar role on an international scope in the company’s offices in Oslo, Norway.
Sarkar and McManis say Meek is expected to be a “very good witness” at trial. They say they will also show documents that will prove “the process [Equinor] went through to terminate Meek coupled with their culture and obsession with age.”
“You’ll see evidence that will show a lot of segmentation by age, looking at how many people in the group are over 60, 55 and 50, making it clear that this is setting up for age discrimination,” Sarkar said.
After oil prices plummeted in 2014, Statoil eliminated thousands of jobs as part of cost-cutting programs to save more than $1 billion in expenses. Last spring, the company also rebranded to a new name, Equinor, to reflect its commitment to developing more renewable energy.