EP 1010: Breaking Barriers: Inside a Trailblazing Career in Employment Law Part 1

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Heels in the Courtroom where the trial lawyers of the Simon Law Firm break down what it takes to win in the courtroom and in life.

Elizabeth Lenivy:

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Heals in the Courtroom. I’m Liz Lenivy and today I’m joined by Mary Simon, Elizabeth McNulty, Katie St. John, Sydney Marino, and a very special guest, Mary Anne Sedey. Welcome to the podcast, Mary Anne.

Mary Anne Sedey:

Thank you. This is going to be fun.

Elizabeth Lenivy:

I am so excited. So excited. I’m so thrilled. Mary Anne, I’m going to give a little bit of your background here just for those who may not have the pleasure of knowing you. So hang tight while I roll through some quick facts about you. Mary Ann is a graduate from SLU Law, class of 1975.

Mary Anne Sedey:

Yes.

Elizabeth Lenivy:

All right. She is the founder of the law firms today, Harper Westoff, that specializes in employment law, advancing the rights of employees, particularly women. Mary Anne is a nationally recognized trial attorney and if you stay tuned in this episode, you will find out why that is. She is also a very impressive appellate attorney, in fact, arguing at the Supreme Court of the United States. We’re going to talk about that case. Mary Anne was the president of the National Employment Lawyers Association from 1995 to 1998 and served on the board for 12 years. She was also appointed a fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers in 1996 and served for two years as a member of the Executive Board of the College. From 2004 through 2007, she was president of Workplace Fairness, a non-for-profit organization working to preserve and promote employees rights. Mary Anne has been described by the St. Louis Business Journal as “feared in corporate boardrooms” willing to go up against the big boys.

And Human Resources Executive Magazine called her one of the top 10 plaintiff’s attorneys to fear the most. Looking at her website, there’s a quote that I think embodies who you are as a professional, and I just want to read that on here from Mary Anne. “I’m a trial lawyer and I love the courtroom, but I am also a problem solver. Sometimes my client needs a zealous advocate at trial and sometimes my client needs to get a good severance and move on. I love working with clients to achieve their goals. This is also not something that you will find on any website, but Mary Anne is a personal hero of mine and just one of my favorite people that I have gotten to meet in this career. So I’m so, so excited to have you on the podcast. Really, thank you so much for joining us. And what we’re going to talk about today actually, Elizabeth and I have already heard a lot of this, but it is because recently Mary Anne presented a CLE for a women’s symposium that Elizabeth and I attended.

I’ve always known that you are a badass trial attorney and such a fierce woman and a fierce advocate, but I did not realize the depth of your career. And so in this particular presentation, you went through some of the biggest cases that you’ve had and the lessons that you’ve learned. I was sitting there listening to it thinking,” Oh my, I’ve known Mary Anne for years. How did I not know all of this? “And Elizabeth and I got to talking and we’re like, ” This needs to be preserved and recorded. This is important information. This is important history for all female trial attorneys. I think especially in St. Louis and in Missouri, we owe such a debt of gratitude to you for breaking that glass ceiling so that women like us can practice in the environment that we do now. “So I am gushing right now. I’m fan girling so far, but it’s genuine.

Elizabeth McNulty:

I’m like, okay, I want to be Mary Anne’s day.

Elizabeth Lenivy:

Right. How do I become

Elizabeth McNulty:

Mary Anne. Shoulders and … Yeah. Right.

Elizabeth Lenivy:

So basically after listening to this presentation, we were like, ” Can you basically come on the podcast and just talk to us so that more people, a wider audience can hear about the incredible career that you have had, the path that you have made for yourself and that we are so lucky to follow in your footsteps now. So with that, Mary Anne, I’m just going to kind of turn it over to you.

Mary Anne Sedey:

Sure. So as you said, I graduated from law school in 75 and just to give you a little context, the class before us had three women in it, at St. Louis U Law School. And then my class had 28 women, one of whom was pregnant when she came, which gave a lot of the professors a lot of worry.

And so we were kind of the first big bunch of women who got involved in law school and then went on to have careers. There were certainly people ahead of us that had careers, but I remember people like Shu Simon. I don’t know if you know Shulamith Simon, but she was a real powerhouse as well and probably 10 years ahead of me. And Shu said she had a really hard time finding a job anywhere when she graduated from law school. She actually had to feed herself as a legal secretary for a while. So that was the climate before. So things were changing fast. It was the height of the women’s movement. So it was a great time to go to law school and get out of law school. So at some point, I guess after our first year, three of my friends came to me and said,” Don’t look for jobs next summer.

Let’s start a women’s law firm. “And I’m like, ” Oh, okay.

Why not? “So we did that and we went and we rented an office downtown and we started the first women’s law firm in St. Louis. And it was the time again, because it was the height of the women’s movement when women wanted women lawyers. So they wanted women lawyers to get them a divorce. They wanted women lawyers to write their wills. And so we started a general practice. We didn’t say we’re only going to help women, but a lot of women came to us. I was always interested in employment discrimination and that was another piece of what we did. A lot of divorces, a lot of wills, a lot of employment discrimination suits. And it was really fun and it was really interesting. I always have to tell this part of the story, a lot of men helped us. We had a law firm upstairs that, I mean, I can remember the number of times I ran up those stairs and said,” Hey, do you have a pleading about this, or what do I do about that?

“And people were very gracious to us and very kind to us and I’ve always been very grateful to the St. Louis legal community for that. So that was kind of the beginning of it. And then over time I decided that I really wanted to do employment law, that that was the thing I really liked. I started out doing employment law for women, but then you get into it and we do employment law for everybody now. Most always employees, we don’t do any employer work and it’s been a really great career. And I think the reason I didn’t retire for so long is that I just really loved it and had a great time. Loved my clients, loved what I did. So that’s kind of how it all started. I had some really exciting cases. The first one I’ll talk about because it went to the Supreme Court is a case called Forrester versus White.

This case was in the Southern District of Illinois. I represented a woman who was a juvenile probation officer in a trial level court in Jersey County, Illinois. And she was a social worker. That’s what she did for a living. She was very professional. The judge in that county had the power to hire and fire court employees and she was one of his employees. His name was Howard Lee White and in a sort of a good old boy move when the high school football coach retired, he hired him to come be the juvenile probation officer. And at first he said,” Well, he would just work next to Cindy. “But what he really did was he demoted her and turned this guy into her boss and he was just terrible. He was just making another living on top of his pension. He was the judge’s buddy. And just one thing I always remember from the case is taking his deposition and asking him,” Well, how many home visits have you made?

“Because of course this is what juvenile probation officers do. They go to the home, they meet with the parents, they meet with the kids. He couldn’t remember having made on. So it was that kind of a thing. Basically he would sit around with the judge and they’d kibitz all day and Cindy complained. I mean, she said,” I’m the probation officer. I do the work. He’s my boss now. He’s getting paid more than me. “And so that was the beginning of it. Judge White did not appreciate her complaining and eventually he fired her. So we tried the case, we got a jury verdict and the judge who tried it jokes with me and says that he was responsible for sending me to the US Supreme Court and he actually is a great guy. His name is magistrate or he was the magistrate, a magistrate in the Southern District of Illinois.

Anyway, at the end of the trial, the defendants filed a motion to take the verdict away on the basis of the doctrine of judicial immunity saying you can’t sue a judge for decisions made in his or her judicial capacity. So there went the jury verdict. We appealed to the Seventh Circuit and I think the person who really sent me to the US Supreme Court was Judge Posner, who at the time was a very, very influential conservative on the Seventh Circuit. And he wrote a very strong dissent and said that the client should have a claim. And so the distinction became between actions of a judge in his judicial capacity and in his administrative capacity. And so we went to the Supreme Court. I got to argue the case. We won nine to zero and Sandra Day O’Connor, who was the only woman and the first woman made the decisions wrote the decision.

So it was a very exciting experience, an experience most lawyers really don’t get because so few cases are accepted by the court for certiorari. So it was terrifying, but it was also wonderful. And I love to tell two stories out of that experience of the actual argument and that is that I am short as everybody knows. So you get to the courtroom, you meet the chief clerk of the US Supreme Court as the first person, he’s not the first person, but they usher you into his office. He says,” Good morning. “He says a couple things. He shakes your hand and the next thing you know, you’re out there waiting your turn. So I get up to argue and I’m nervous and I’m not noticing much and I look down and somebody has miraculously placed a box in front of the podium so that I get to stand Up. I mean, talk about thinking of a detail, right?

The other great story is that they asked a lot of questions because one of the most interesting things about this case was that if a judge in Jersey County, Illinois could be sued for employment discrimination, so could a member of the US Supreme Court, any judge. I mean, this doctrine either did or did not aply to this situation at all levels of the judiciary. So it was a very interesting argument and I loved it and it was really fun. And once you start talking, you calm down and you’re all fine. And at some point, Thurgood Marshall, who was on the court, was the first black member of the US Supreme Court asked me, well, if he fired his chauffeur, he could be sued. And I’ve just kind of taken aback because first of all, I didn’t think of Thurgood Marshall as somebody who had a chauffeur, but all members of the Supreme Court have a chauffeur.

And so I kind of took a deep breath and I said, “Well, Your Honor, as long as you don’t discriminate in terms of the firing on the base of race, sex, religion, disability, national origin, et cetera, you’re going to be just fine.” And I got a lot of laughs and it was fun. And my husband calls at that time I gave Thurgood Marshall legal advice.

And one other thing, these things are so amazing, this kind of experience. There were like 30 people there to see me do this. Friends from St. Louis traveled with me, friends who lived in Washington DC came, my parents came, my dad came, a number of my sisters, my kids were there. So it was really what they call a peak experience. It was really great. And it helped to make my reputation, my career. I have the picture of the article in the post dispatch with a picture of Sandra Day O’Connor talking about the decision and it was a big deal and it was really an amazing experience and I made not a dime. If anything, we lost money on lots of money, but that’s okay because it made my career. So that was kind of the first really big case.

Elizabeth McNulty:

How’d you get your client to just hang in there with you throughout all

Mary Anne Sedey:

This? You know what? This is a sad truth. At the end, Cindy was there at the argument, so it was all over. And eventually we settled the case, not for as much as we should have because she just didn’t want another trial. She didn’t want to go through it again. My God, yes. By this time we’re like five years in, she’s moved somewhere, she’s remarried. I mean, I said to her, “Cindy, if you had the option, would you do it again?” She said, no.

Elizabeth McNulty:

Wow. Yeah.

Mary Anne Sedey:

Of course not.

Elizabeth McNulty:

I bet a lot of clients would say that.

Mary Anne Sedey:

I think so. That’s such a

Elizabeth McNulty:

Battle.

Mary Anne Sedey:

It was such a battle. Stick the

Elizabeth McNulty:

Ring.

Mary Anne Sedey:

And one of the reasons she ended up moving was she couldn’t get a job in the area.

Elizabeth McNulty:

Oh, wow.

Mary Anne Sedey:

Yeah. These things are hard on clients. I always say to clients now, I’m not sure I would’ve encouraged Cindy to do the lawsuit as I got older and wiser because now I say to clients, as much as I love litigating, the last thing you want to do is file a lawsuit because every time somebody puts your name in Google up it comes and people are skeptical of people who file lawsuits. And so if all things being equal, they’ll hire somebody else the next time.

Elizabeth McNulty:

Yeah. I do like though even the courage sometimes that clients don’t even understand that not only your courage, but the courage of you and the client to make the moves that you did, it just has a wonderful effect on your future clients.

Mary Anne Sedey:

I mean- It absolutely does. Cindy said, no, I wouldn’t do it again, but there are clients who just do things on principle. They don’t have to do this, but they want to do it. And another one of those is a case that I lost that I was very sad about, but the Francine Katz case against Anheuser-Busch. I mean, Francine Katz didn’t have to sue Anheuser-Busch. She was the highest ranking person woman at AB. She was the first female member of the strategy committee at Anheuser-Busch. And she said to me, and she’s still a friend and I’m completely convinced that this is true. She said, “I don’t have to do this, but if I don’t do this, there are a lot of other people who don’t have the freedom to do this the way I do. ” And so she brought this case and when it was over, it was really interesting.

This case I lost and we can talk about it more. But when it was over, I said to Francine, “Okay, yes, we can appeal.” But it was a pretty clean trial. Rex Burleson was our judge and he did a really good job and there’s a couple things I could have argued with, but I said, “The risk we take if we appeal is that we’ll make bad law.” She said, “She did not drop a beat.” She said, “Then we’re not appealing.” And it’s that kind of client who makes a huge difference for everybody else because I guarantee AB was a lot … Either they got smarter or they got to believe that they needed to put women in important positions and pay them the way they did men. So the clients are just very courageous sometimes, I think. The other kinds of clients that are very courageous, and it’s in their DNA are whistleblowers, people who say, “Well, I’m not going to do that thing you want me to do, boss, because it’s against the law.” And those people also really make a difference to both employees who come after them but also to the public.

I’ve had whistleblowers who were medical professionals, I’ve had whistleblowers who worked in OSHA type fields where there were a lot of regulations to protect the other workers and the company wasn’t following them. So those are also people who have tremendous guts. Do

Elizabeth McNulty:

You know what I think is so funny? I mean, this is so … Okay. It’s in line with the conversation, but it’s kind of taking a left turn, but not really. But my daughter is really into … She’s four and she loves the movie Zootopia. And I screenshotted a quote from it because Judy Hops, the bunny who wants to be a police officer, says, “The world will never be a better place if no one’s brave enough to do the right thing.”

Mary Anne Sedey:

Exactly.

Elizabeth McNulty:

And I mean, that’s you and your clients.

Mary Anne Sedey:

It is. It’s put on principle. And in my case, this is not my life that I’m taking a chance with. I mean, you do take a lot of risk as a plaintiff’s lawyer. You all know that. I mean, there’s no question about it, but for the clients, the risk is much greater and the people who really have to have the courage are the clients and that’s just an interesting fact. And I mean, I admire them so much.

Elizabeth Lenivy:

Can we stay on the Katz case for a moment there? And

Mary Anne Sedey:

I think

Elizabeth Lenivy:

We may have flipped to it in your notes, but for listeners who may not be aware … And I remember when that case was making its way through, because it wasn’t that long ago and it was in the news. It got a lot of press coverage. Obviously, Anheuser-Busch is a very powerful company.

Mary Anne Sedey:

It wasn’t just in the news. It was televised. One of the stations came in and got permission to have cameras in the courtrooms. The whole trial was televised. So I had people all over saying to me stuff about my opening statement, my closing argument. Oh, great things. I mean, people were very, very complimentary, but it was such an odd experience to know that a trial was being televised.

Katie St. John:

In all honesty, Mary Anne, I love court TV and that’s what they do is televise trials and that I always joke with everyone like, “I don’t watch real TV. I just watch trials.” It’s

Mary Anne Sedey:

Great. I love

Katie St. John:

It. I do like that. I do like that part, but anyways,

Elizabeth Lenivy:

Can you give a quick synopsis? Obviously sex discrimination, but what was going on that your client wanted to fight against?

Mary Anne Sedey:

So my client, as I said, was the first woman on what they call the strategy committee at Anheuser-Busch. And her job was a communications type job and she was the head of all communications for Anheuser-Busch. She was the first woman and I think the strategy committee at the time had like 15 members. So you got the guy who was head of sales, the guy who was head of marketing, the person who’s, and I use the word guy advisedly the guy who’s the head of making the beer, but lots of the chief council, the CFO, the CEO, all the big people are on the strategy committee and she didn’t have a clue how much money anybody made. She just knew what she made and she knew she made a wonderful living. I mean, there were all these things. She’s a really classy person. And so they introduced all these thank you notes that she would send to Mr. Bush when she got a raise or things like that, because that’s just how she was.

Elizabeth McNulty:

She was kind. She was. Shocker.

Mary Anne Sedey:

Right. Exactly. They thought that was a big deal, proved she was perfectly happy with her salary. But what happened was that when AB was being bought by Bev, SEC requires certain disclosures and as a result of seeing those disclosures. So in these disclosures, they gave the top five salaries and those weren’t surprising, but then they also had to disclose how much all of the members of the strategy committee had been awarded in stock options and the disparity was mind boggling. So that’s what kind of centered down this road of understanding for the first time how much less money she made than every other member of the strategy committe. And we’re talking millions of dollars a year when you talk about stock options, stock awards, bonuses, all that stuff. And so that was how this thing started. The other thing about it was that her predecessor, the guy who had the job before her, made a lot more money than she did too.

The other funny, funny, pathetic but interesting thing is that the second woman they put on the strategy committee was the second lowest paid person. Yeah. I mean, so there was like what we call a pattern. Now

There were a lot of problems with the case, not in the facts per se, but in any kind of case where you’re challenging pay disparities, each of these people had a unique job. And so it wasn’t like you would look at somebody who did exactly what she did. And the truth is her predecessor had done some things she didn’t do, she did some things he didn’t do. I mean, there was no exact comparison, which is what you’re always looking for in these cases, but the pattern was so strong that we definitely wanted to take the case. It’s hard to figure whether a jury is going to care about giving a lot of money to somebody who has a lot of money. And we fought the arbitration clause and sometimes I think we might have been better off in arbitration

Because an arbitrator is not going to be so sort of cynical about how much money she already had. And so what we did find was that a lot of members of the jury cared a lot, but there were a few who didn’t care or who were absolutely adamant that they weren’t going to give her any money. One young man who walked into the jury box to deliberate and said, “I’m not giving her any money.” And interesting, the jury deliberated for two and a half days. These are like, the longer it goes, the more you know you’re going down the chute. And for a long time it was eight to four. Yeah, you need nine. And so finally one of the four got convinced to move to the other side and sobbing. It was a very disappointing thing, but it was still, again, an amazing experience.

And one of these things that was a career maker because everybody in town knew about this case. The Bushes were then the closest thing we had to royalty in St. Louis. They really were and they were the company was a beloved company in a lot of ways. I once tried another case against Danheiser Bush and one of the things I asked the panel was, how many of you have ever applied to work at Anheuser-Busch? And this was 30, 35 years ago. And I’m telling you, almost everybody had applied for a job there. Now we managed to overcome that and we won that case, but it just gives you a sense of what a big deal they are. And back in those days, this is pre InBev, but they own the Cardinals and the horses and the hall. I mean, it’s part of the St. Louis story.

Elizabeth McNulty:

Can I ask you a question about this? So in a case like that, is this the one that was televised?

Mary Anne Sedey:

Yes.

Elizabeth McNulty:

So if a case like that’s televised and all this information, I’m imagining all the disparities there, it’s coming out in evidence, right?

Announcer:

Yep.

Elizabeth McNulty:

I don’t know if you ever find this out, does it have, even if win, lose or otherwise, does it have an impact on women who then get hired at AB that their salaries are not, that there’s not such a big disparity or-

Mary Anne Sedey:

I’ll tell you a secret. The woman from the general … It’s not a secret. There was a woman lawyer who was the general counsel kind of person on this case.

Announcer:

Sure.

Mary Anne Sedey:

She was the lawyer in house who was responsible for this case. Well, she’s the general counsel now, so they did learn some lessons.

Elizabeth McNulty:

Well, right? I mean, you’d think so.

Mary Anne Sedey:

Yeah. Probably not as many as we would like for them to have learned, but yeah, they learned some lessons.

Elizabeth McNulty:

Yeah. Yeah, because I feel typically in cases and in other types of cases, sometimes when you get dumped in one of our cases, it’s like not much changes then. And I’m just kind of like, okay, maybe the companies just carry on like they do. But if it’s something like dollars that are getting put down and it’s like, if you’re a woman who’s applying for this position and you know what you’re walking into, I don’t know that you’d want that in the courtroom if you’re AB, but I guess it all gets publicized. So I’d imagine it has some sort of.

Mary Anne Sedey:

Yeah. I think it had an impact. I really do. And it is interesting to look back at the whole experience because the other thing that happened at AB was that once Inbev bought it, it was run much more like any other corporation.

It was a fiefdom in the days when the Bush family still owned it and it was, this is funny when I sued them earlier times and I’ve sued them many times, I took a lot of depositions of men in comparable positions to my female clients and after a while I realized they all had the same hairdo and I mean hairdrew literally and they all lived in the same zip code. I was like blown away when I finally realized this and you know whose hairdo they had? They had August Bush the fourth haircut and they all tried to look like him. They all lived in South County in the same area. Anyway- That is

Elizabeth McNulty:

So funny.

Mary Anne Sedey:

I know, just a funny aside, but it’s not like that anymore there. I mean now the Brazilians have their own problems, but it’s a different kind of place now than it was. That is so funny. It was a very, very interesting case. And the lawyer who tried the case for AB is Jim Bennett. Jim Bennett’s like a phenomenal lawyer. So it was no shame to lose to Jim Bennett.

Elizabeth Lenivy:

Sure. It always eases the pain of losing a trial when you know you’ve got really good opposing counsel. Yeah.

Mary Anne Sedey:

I’ll tell you when it hurts is when you have somebody on the other side who was so bad and it’s like, how the hell did I lose you?

Katie St. John:

It’s a different kind of feeling,

Mary Anne Sedey:

Right? Yeah.

Katie St. John:

So I’m just sitting here listening and all I can think about is like with both of these two cases we’ve talked about, like first you’re suing a judge and then you’re going, now we’re talking about suing AB at the time where they are, like you said, St. Louis royalty as an attorney, as a female attorney, how do you overcome, or maybe you didn’t have this, but like that internal dialogue of like, I don’t know if it’s fear or what it is, but it’s like, I’m going to take on this defendant, like a judge in this case, like, what if I have to see that judge again and I’m in his courtroom again? Did you have any of that in your mind when you’re going through these cases just personally as a female attorney or I mean

Mary Anne Sedey:

It’s interesting. I think I would think about it more now than I did then. I mean, I was very, what’s the word I want? I wasn’t naive. I was not naive, but I was pretty stalwart about my principles. I mean, I went to St. Louis U Law School. I adore St. Louis U Law School. It was such a good place for me and the women that went to law school together. I have sued St. Louis University. I mean, not the law school, but I have sued St. Louis University. I mean, it’s sort of like, well, I think I just decided early on if the conduct was bad and all the things were there that made it a good case, we were just going to sue them, whoever they were. We’ve sued the Circuit Court of St. Louis County for a woman once who was pregnant and didn’t get a job and they told her that it wasn’t that she was pregnant, it was that she was going to need a leave of absence early in her career to be sort of six and one and a half dozen of another, but it was dumped on summary judgment and I think that’s why, because they were

A big deal, the circuit court. But interestingly, nobody has ever held it against me there that I know of. I mean, I have a great relationship with a lot of the judges in the county.

Elizabeth Lenivy:

Mary Anne, this This has been such a fun conversation. We have more to talk about and that’s going to come next episode drop part two. So we’re going to stop here. Thank you all for tuning into this first episode with Mary Anne. Now you can see why I was talking her up so much at the beginning of the episode because she lives up to the hype. Remember, new episodes drop every other Wednesday and if you want to join the conversation, you can reach out to us at heelsinthcourtroom.com.

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