Kelly M. Dermody

Kelly M. Dermody described a demanding threshold for taking on a class action. In a 2021 interview, she said she accepted fewer than one percent of the cases offered to her. “You have to be convinced that there is some sort of policy you can attack,” she told Bloomberg Law. The commitment could require years of work from lawyers and clients.

In Ellis v. Google, Dermody represented Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, Kelli Wisuri and Heidi Lamar with lawyers from Lieff Cabraser and Altshuler Berzon. The women alleged that Google paid them less than men performing substantially similar work in covered California positions. They also challenged the level assigned when an employee joined the company.

Their jobs differed. Ellis worked as a software engineer and left Google with the title of senior manager. Pease held technical leadership positions, Wisuri worked in operations and communications, and Lamar taught at Google’s children’s center. The plaintiffs’ team had to connect individual hiring and employment records to common practices governing covered job codes, levels and compensation.

A level determined an employee’s compensation range, expected responsibility, bonus opportunity and promotion path. The leveling claim alleged that Google used prior compensation in ways that placed some women below men with comparable education and experience. A lower entry tier could mean less pay immediately, smaller bonuses and more steps to the next promotion.

Choosing Civil-Rights Work

Dermody’s decision to become a civil-rights lawyer took shape during a break from college. After her sophomore year at Harvard, she went to Washington to intern in Senator Edward Kennedy’s office. She later recalled that encounters with advocates and lawyers, together with her experience of coming out as gay in the late 1980s, deepened her interest in racial equity and the law’s effect on people’s lives.

She returned to Harvard, graduated in 1990 and earned her law degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. During law-school summers, she worked on police-misconduct matters at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and housing discrimination at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She joined Lieff Cabraser in 1994.

Dermody is now managing partner of the firm’s San Francisco office and a partner in San Francisco and New York. Her civil-rights and employment practice includes challenges to hiring, promotion, compensation and performance systems. In Ellis, that work required distinct comparisons of the pay women received and the levels at which they entered.

Two Claims and the Records to Test Them

The plaintiffs filed in September 2017 with allegations involving pay, leveling, job channeling and promotions. By the class-certification stage, they had concentrated their case on pay discrimination and leveling-at-hire. The equal-pay claim compared women and men doing substantially similar work within covered job codes. The leveling claim compared the entry tiers of women and men with comparable qualifications.

The court certified both claims in May 2021. Google sought appellate review, but its petition was denied. The ruling allowed the defined groups to proceed through common proof, using the job-code structure, hiring process and statistical analysis to test whether shared practices affected women differently across covered positions.

The certified classes covered specified California positions and employment periods. The leveling claim concerned women hired before the relevant policy change; the court’s definitions identified which employees and claims could proceed together.

Obtaining the records took three years of discovery disputes. The parties contested access to fields in Google’s personnel data, internal discrimination complaints and pay, performance and promotion equity audits. They also negotiated whose electronic records should be searched and the terms used to find relevant material.

Before settlement, Google had produced 60 sets of documents totaling 163,491 pages. The parties had taken 19 depositions: the four named plaintiffs, eleven Google corporate representatives and four experts. Additional merits discovery was underway. Dermody and the two-firm team used that record to examine the information considered at hire, comparisons among candidates, the relationship between job codes and compensation, and whether pay-equity studies captured the consequences of initial placement.

The individual employment records remained part of that inquiry. The class team sought common proof about recurring inputs and procedures. Trial would require competing statistical models, expert testimony about substantially similar work and detailed examination of both hiring and compensation practices.

Compensation and Independent Review

The parties mediated in March 2022 and continued negotiating by telephone over the next two months. They signed a memorandum of understanding on June 2. Final approval in October 2022 resolved the certified class claims through settlement.

The agreement created a $118 million gross fund, with approximately $86 million allocated to participating class members under its distribution formula. Unused money would not revert to Google. The judgment subsequently became final and payments were distributed.

The formula divided the net fund between the equal-pay class and the leveling subclass. Awards reflected the agreement’s factors, including time employed, job history and the particular certified claim, rather than an identical payment to every worker. The allocation connected compensation to the alleged losses the two claims addressed.

Dermody and the class team also obtained three years of outside review. An independent third-party expert was assigned to analyze leveling-at-hire practices, and an independent labor economist to examine Google’s recurring pay-equity studies. An external monitor would supervise that work and Google’s good-faith efforts to address the experts’ recommendations.