Race Discrimination Verdict in Favor of Employees, but Defense Lawyers are the Big Winners
On July 29, 2009, the Town of Greenwhich Connecticut was found liable for race discrimination. A federal jury determined that several minority police officers endured a racially hostile work environment and were denied promotions on account of their race. The officers were awarded $160,000 for their troubles. But the town of Greenwhich apparently spent over $700,000 defending the case. For more on this story please the Connecticut Employee Rights Blog
I am glad the minority officers won their case, but the big winners here are the lawyers who were paid $700,000 to defend the town of Greenwhich. Even though they lost the case, they are the ones who got most of the money. Too bad there is not a legal procedure that would allow the money to be diverted from the law firm to the victims. This illustrates one of the problems with our anti-discrimination laws. The laws tend to help the company lawyers more than anyone. I would love to see a study that looks at all the money spent in a given year on employment discrimination cases nationwide. I bet that most of that money goes to the company defense lawyers and not to the victims of discrimination.
