Anne B. Shaver

Who Keeps the Value of the Work

Who keeps the value of another person's work? Anne B. Shaver has pressed that question across three different arenas. A compensation structure can suppress pay within a company; a no-hire agreement can shrink mobility across an entire labor market; an artificial-intelligence training corpus can absorb creative labor into a commercial product. The settings could hardly look less alike — a tech campus, a hospital system, a large language model — but Shaver approaches them with a single analytic habit: find who created the value, who controlled its use, and whether the law offers a collective remedy when bargaining power sits entirely on the other side. A partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco, she has turned that habit into some of the most consequential workplace class actions of the past decade, and now into the leading edge of the fight over what AI owes the people whose work built it.

Her preparation for that career was itself a study in how legal power operates. Shaver graduated cum laude from the University of California, Santa Cruz, earned her J.D. from Berkeley Law in 2007 with membership in the Order of the Coif, and clerked for Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit — one of the great liberal jurists of the modern federal bench, whose decades of opinions on employment and civil rights offered a daily seminar in how doctrine reaches working people.

Making the Pay Gap Legible

The cases that made Shaver's name required converting compensation systems into evidence. In the Google pay-equity litigation, she helped lead a certified class of more than 15,000 women employed in California, alleging that the company paid women less than men doing substantially similar work and slotted new hires into levels — and therefore salaries — partly on the basis of prior pay. Her public statement of the case's premise was as plain as the statute itself: women at Google were not receiving equal pay for equal work. The litigation resolved in 2022 for $118 million, paired with a structural mechanism rare even in large settlements — analysis of Google's pay practices by outside experts, with third-party monitoring, so that the practices generating the disparities would be examined rather than merely paid for.

The Goldman Sachs litigation ran longer and cut deeper into the machinery of professional advancement. For well over a decade, Chen-Oster v. Goldman Sachs pressed claims that the bank's performance-evaluation and promotion processes disadvantaged women associates and vice presidents. Shaver represented the certified class through the grinding sequence that defines modern employment litigation — certification, expert battles, decertification attempts, arbitration fights over who could remain in court — until the case resolved in 2023 for $215 million on behalf of roughly 2,800 women, one of the largest gender-discrimination settlements in the history of the American workplace. The agreement went beyond the fund: independent experts would examine the bank's performance-evaluation and pay processes. In both cases the strategy was the same. Statistical proof made the pattern visible across the workforce; individual careers showed how the pattern actually ran; and the remedy reached both the process and the payroll.

The Market as a Workplace

Shaver's antitrust work extends the pay-equity question past any single employer's walls. In the Duke and University of North Carolina no-hire litigation, she served as counsel for a class of academic physicians who alleged that the two institutions — the dominant medical employers of their region — had agreed not to recruit each other's faculty. The case treated professional mobility as an economic right in itself: a restraint on recruitment can depress compensation and opportunity even when workers remain formally free to apply elsewhere, because so much of labor-market bargaining power comes from the credible possibility of being hired away. The litigation resolved for $54.5 million for a class of more than 5,000 physicians and researchers, and it helped establish the no-poach agreement as a live target of worker-side antitrust enforcement. Her practice in that field has continued through litigation over no-hire arrangements in franchise systems, including claims on behalf of McDonald's workers — cases arguing that competition law protects the price of labor as vigilantly as the price of goods. The American Antitrust Institute has twice honored her work with Outstanding Achievement awards, in 2019 and 2024.

She has carried the same collective instinct into retirement security, representing a class of Save Mart Supermarkets retirees in an ERISA action challenging the elimination of the retiree medical benefits they had earned over careers in the grocery chain — the kind of case in which the value of decades of work, banked as a promise, is defended after the fact.

The Training Corpus and the Author

The newest arena is the one Shaver now helps define. She chairs Lieff Cabraser's Artificial Intelligence Working Group and represents authors in pending copyright class actions alleging that AI companies — among them OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Databricks, and Cerebras — copied their books without permission to train commercial models. The litigation is unfolding now, and its questions are the oldest ones in her practice wearing new clothing: who created the value, who took it, and whether the people who made the underlying work can act collectively against enterprises that used it at industrial scale. The technology is unprecedented; the inquiry is not. A novelist whose book was ingested into a training corpus stands in a position structurally familiar to a Google engineer leveled by her prior salary or a physician boxed in by a no-hire pact — an individual whose work generated value captured under rules she never negotiated.

Her bar leadership tracks her subject matter: past co-chair of the American Bar Association's Equal Employment Opportunity Committee, co-chair of the ABA Labor and Employment Law Section's national conference, and service with the Bar Association of San Francisco and the National Employment Lawyers Association. She writes and speaks constantly — on pay equity, restrictive covenants, and, increasingly, on what AI is doing to the workplace itself.

Shaver tests compensation systems in pay-equity litigation and challenges restrictions on movement between employers in antitrust cases. She represents authors pursuing copyright claims over the use of their books to train commercial AI models. She connects evidence of shared practices to their effects on workers and writers, building the common proof needed to seek relief collectively.