Legal News

Wal-Mart Roundup: A New GC, and Welcome News from the 9th Circuit

By Ashby Jones

Click over to the WSJ’s home page right now, and you’ll see the big news about Wal-Mart — that fourth-quarter net income for the world’s largest retailer fell 7.4 percent.

But the company had some legal news over the weekend as well. For starters, it named a new general counsel — Jeffrey Gearhart — who will be replacing Tom Mars. Gearhart, 44, joined Wal-Mart’s legal department in 2003 and since 2007 has been senior vice president and deputy GC. Mars will becomes the company’s chief administrative officer. Click here for the AmLaw Daily’s take.

And in other Wal-Mart news, the Ninth Circuit has agreed to reconsider whether a huge sexual-discrimination lawsuit filed against the company should proceed as a class-action. The court declared late Friday that it would rehear a 2007 ruling by a three-member panel of the same court, which upheld a district court’s decision to certify the case, Dukes v. Wal-Mart, as a class action. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the 2007 Law Blog post on the original Ninth Circuit decision.

The full appeals court will now revisit the contentious case, which began in 2001 when a 54-year-old Wal-Mart employee from California named Betty Dukes filed a sexual discrimination claim against the world’s largest retailer, alleging that she was denied the training needed to obtain a higher-paying job because of her sex.

The case subsequently grew to include 2 million women who have worked at Wal-Mart since December of 1998, which lawyers say makes it among the largest class-action sexual discrimination cases in the country. The current legal exposure for Wal-Mart is in the billions of dollars, given the size of the class, according to some of the attorneys involved.

Joseph Sellers, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, played down the ruling. “Apparently the court thought there were issues that needed to be addressed by the full court of appeals,” said Mr. Sellers, of Cohen Milstein. “We don’t expect a different outcome.”

Photo: Getty Images

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 17, 2009 (boomark / email).