It’s not me. It’s you.
Pregnancy can come with some pretty big surprises — one of them being getting fired before you could take maternity leave. Anisha Mehta, is suing Biglaw firm DLA Piper for firing her 6 days after she made her request. Bloomberg Law has coverage:
DLA Piper LLP says a former senior associate was fired for “a series of increasingly catastrophic blunders” and her lawsuit should be dismissed because she can’t prove her pregnancy bias, leave interference, and retaliation claims.
The intellectual property attorney also shouldn’t get a trial because she “regularly turned in sloppy work product” even though she was a seventh-year associate, the international law firm said Tuesday in seeking summary judgment in the case. The two Intellectual Property and Trademark Group partners with whom she most regularly worked quickly grew disappointed with her abilities and concluded that she wasn’t capable of meeting the firm’s expectations for an associate of her seniority level, DLA Piper said.
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Quite the bombshell to drop before a pregnancy leave! It is worth recalling that DLA Piper has a history of making baffling employee calls when it comes to raising children — they did slash their parental leave benefits by 6 weeks for no clear reason earlier this year.
After Mehta disclosed her pregnancy, she noted that the partner that ultimately fired her said that she should take full advantage of her leave before transitioning back to work. That seems like advice to ease someone in their recovery and return, not a polite way to direct them toward LinkedIn. A couple of the errors the firm noted were typos Mehta made in internal documents like using the wrong company name or country, but those hardly seem to be that catastrophic considering that the mistakes were caught before they left the firm.
DLA Piper Says Associate Fired Over Performance, Not Pregnancy [Bloomberg Law]
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.