© 2012 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
Senior Writer for The Texas Lawbook
Lawyers for Wal-Mart asked U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Dallas to reject a class action employment discrimination lawsuit claiming to represent more than 50,000 women who have worked at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores in Texas.
The proposed class action, which was filed one year ago in the Northern District Court of Texas by seven women who worked at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores during the past 14 years, claims that the company demonstrated gender bias by denying them promotions and paying them less than their male counterparts. The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief as well as financial damages.
In court Thursday, lawyers representing Wal-Mart described the lawsuit as a “copycat rerun” of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year in Wal-Mart v. Dukes in which the justices rejected similar claims as being too large and too unwieldy and not having enough common factual threads among the women plaintiffs.
The Texas case was filed after the Supreme Court rejected the attempt to certify a national class action in the Dukes case.
Dallas employment and labor lawyer Hal Gillespie, a partner at Gillespie, Rozen & Watsky, told Judge O’Connor that the facts in the Dallas case are specifically limited to the experiences of women employees in Wal-Mart stores in Texas.
Gibson Dunn has a team of lawyers representing Wal-Mart, including Dallas partners Karl Nelson and Veronica Lewis.
Similar lawsuits have been filed against Wal-Mart in a half-dozen other states. For more details on this litigation, here is a link to a great story by Bloomberg News. Bloomberg has done some terrific coverage of these cases.
© 2012 The Texas Lawbook. Content of The Texas Lawbook is controlled and protected by specific licensing agreements with our subscribers and under federal copyright laws. Any distribution of this content without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.