Discrimination & Harassment Cases

A class of African-American employees was subjected to death threats and racist harassment. Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight settled the case for $1.25 million in damages and a consent decree that effected significant reform in Super Steel Schenectady.

Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight is representing Graham Chase Robinson, a former longtime employee of actor Robert De Niro, in her claims of gender discrimination and retaliation against Mr. De Niro and his corporate alter ego, Canal Productions, Inc. (“Canal”). The civil trial began Monday, October 30, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit was filed on October 3, 2019.

Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight added another female former dean to the gender discrimination collective action lawsuit the firm filed last month against the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona.

September 15, 2015, New York – It’s Fashion Week in New York – even in New York County Supreme Court, where Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight today filed suit against famed Italian designer Giorgio Armani.

Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight filed a sexual harassment suit under federal and New York law against the Trustees of Columbia University and the institution’s noted history professor, William V. Harris, in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.

The Complaint, brought under the federal Equal Pay Act (EPA), alleges that ABOR dramatically underpaid Dr. MacCorquodale during her tenure as Honors College Dean relative to male deans at the university and to her male successors at the Honors College. Dean MacCorquodale had been employed by UA since 1978.

(September 25, 2018) – Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight a leading national public interest law firm, today filed a $30 million race and gender discrimination lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against multibillion-dollar commercial real estate behemoth Cushman & Wakefield, Inc.

April 20 Update: Below is a statement from David Sanford, chair of Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight regarding law firm Chadbourne & Parke’s vote to expel his client Kerrie Campbell from the partnership. Ms. Campbell was a litigation partner at Chadbourne in Washington, DC, on whose behalf Mr. Sanford filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against Chadbourne last year.

On Jan. 29, 2020, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire granted preliminary approval of the class action settlement arising from the misconduct of former tenured professors Todd Heatherton, William Kelley, and Paul in Dartmouth’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Under the Settlement Agreement, Dartmouth has agreed to pay $14,000,000. In addition to this monetary payment, Dartmouth has agreed to a forward-looking commitment to undertake certain programmatic measures.

After filing a gender discrimination action on behalf of female Deans at the University of Arizona in January, the national civil rights law firm Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight is now pursuing a second action for female science professors at the University. Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight filed a gender discrimination class action and collective action lawsuit today against the Arizona Board of Regents in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona on behalf of Katrina Miranda, Ph.D., a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and other similarly situated female science professors at the state’s flagship research institution.

On June 29, 2018, Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight secured final approval of a $4 million class settlement reached in April 2017 for female sales force members of Forest Laboratories and Forest Pharmaceuticals (“Forest”). Judge Ronnie Abrams’ order in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was the capstone of six years of litigation in Barrett et al v. Forest Laboratories, Inc., et al. on behalf of the named plaintiffs and a class of other female employees of the pharmaceutical giant who experienced systematic gender discrimination at the company.

In the largest gender discrimination case to ever go to trial, Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight successfully represented a class of 5,600 female sales representatives of Novartis Pharmaceutical Company in their gender pay and promotion and pregnancy discrimination claims. A unanimous decision by a jury of nine found Novartis liable for gender discrimination in pay and promotion and pregnancy-related matters and awarded 12 former Novartis sales reps $3.36 million in compensatory damages and the class of 5,600 women an additional $250 million in punitive damages In addition, the verdict from the jury meant that the remaining 5,600 women in the class were also entitled to additional awards of backpay and to seek compensatory damage awards up to $300,000 each. The verdict and the resulting monetary awards was the largest ever in the U.S in an employment discrimination case.

(March 23, 2016) New York, NY – Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight filed a complaint Tuesday night in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Columbia University. The complaint alleges that the lip service Columbia pays to gender diversity doesn’t match the reality of how it treats the women who work there. The complaint provides extensive details regarding how the senior leadership of Columbia – including the Provost of the University and the Dean of Columbia Business School – allowed one of Columbia’s senior, tenured professors to sexually harass and obstruct the work of a female junior faculty member, plaintiff Enrichetta Ravina.

Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight filed a lawsuit on February 8, 2022, against Harvard University and the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Complaint alleges that Harvard violated Title IX and Massachusetts Civil Rights and Common laws by willfully ignoring a near-decade-long pattern of sexual harassment and retaliation by tenured Anthropology Professor John Comaroff against three female graduate students in Harvard’s Anthropology Department. The Complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on behalf of the three students, Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn, and Amulya Mandava.