Secretaries / Administrative Assistants

Legal Secretary of the Day: Where's My Fax, MoFo?

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There have been quite a few lawsuits filed by former law firm employees of late. Covington & Burling is fighting off Yolanda Young. Fried Frank is tussling with Julie Kamps. And law firm secretaries across the land are uniting in pursuit of their overtime.
Law firms cutting back and performing layoffs tend to leave people grumpy and litigious. A former Morrison & Foerster secretary joined the angry ranks recently with a lawsuit for wrongful termination. Aileen Martinez worked in MoFo’s San Francisco office for 28 years. She was laid off in January 2009.
According to The Recorder, Martinez said she had to take three months of disability leave in 2008, because she was afraid of litigation associate Mimi Yang.
What did Yang allegedly do to strike fear in the heart of Martinez?


Yang threatened to go on a rampage in pursuit of a fax, says Martinez. From her complaint via ABA Journal:

On or about January 29, 2008, a senior associate of Morrison & Foerster LLP, Mimi Yang was enraged because she could not find a fax that she had sent to a judge the prior week. She threatened to bring an “Uzi” to work and “kill” people if the document was not located (hereinafter “Yang Incident”).
Ms. Martinez feared that she might be killed.
Ms. Yang looked directly at Ms. Martinez when she made this threat to “kill” people.

Martinez had actually been in the MoFo building in 1982, when a workplace shooting took place at an insurance company on another floor. The “Yang Incident” caused her to suffer a PTSD breakdown, and so she took three months off. Martinez filed a police report before returning to work in March 2008.
She speculates that this contributed to her losing her job a year later.
We reached out to Yang, who we discovered is an avid reader, but who was unable to comment. She and MoFo are being represented in the matter by Michael Hallerud, a partner at Nixon Peabody. He told us that MoFo and Yang decline comment on the pending litigation.
We hope Martinez has not visited MoFo’s new website. She’d likely have another PTSD attack from clicking around MoFo’s gunshot sounding page.
Laid-Off Secretary Sues MoFo, Alleges Associate Threat Over Missing Fax [The Recorder]

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