Warring Against Wal-Mart
BERKELEY, CALIF.--When Brad Seligman attended Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in the '70s, he sat in the back of large lecture halls and clucked like a chicken whenever a professor or student said something he deemed absurd. "In three years," says a laughing Seligman, 53, "they never figured out where the clucks came from."
One of the top employment and class action lawyers in the country, Seligman today is still clucking at the status quo--but with tactics far more sophisticated. Seligman is executive director of the Impact Fund, a nonprofit public-interest legal foundation he started in 1993 using $1.25 million of his own money. The squat office building by the waters of the Berkeley Marina is not much to look at--a set of chilly, damp, first-floor rooms filled with cast-off furniture--but it is where the workplace discrimination lawyer leads the charge against the corporate world.
Now, Seligman faces his biggest challenge yet: as lead attorney representing 1.6 million women suing Wal-Mart in the largest civil rights class action suit ever certified. The plaintiffs accuse the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer of systematically paying women less than men for the same work and denying women the opportunity to move into store management positions. With a class size larger than the United States military, a potential settlement or award could reach several billion dollars. The federal case was certified as a class action last June, but Wal-Mart is appealing that ruling. A court date will probably be set in the next few months. "The certification of this case as class action," says Sarah Clark, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, "is improper because the claims of six plaintiffs are not representative of the experience of women at Wal-Mart."
Group effect. Adds Theodore Boutrous, the lead lawyer in the Wal-Mart appeal, describing Seligman's legal tactics: "He's created an entity that gives the impression of a public-interest group, but in reality, you have plaintiffs' firms that will be seeking huge verdicts and settlements like in any other case."
Wal-Mart, nonetheless, has recently made some changes, including posting entry-level management openings for the first time and making pay adjustments. But the outcome could have an even greater ripple effect on the employment practices of the retail industry in general. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer, is the standard-setter not only in prices but also in wages, benefits, and workplace issues.
Which is exactly why the case appeals so much to Seligman. He has made a career out of bringing, and winning, class action lawsuits with big payoffs that have led to sweeping changes in working conditions. He's currently litigating a similar case against Costco. And he's unlikely to be slowed down much by the recent passage of the Class Action Fairness Act, which aims to limit class action suits by transferring many from state to federal courts. Seligman already files most of his cases in federal courts, citing the federal Civil Right Act of 1964, which requires employers to provide equal opportunities and makes racial discrimination illegal in public places. "When we took a case against State Farm in 1980, there was only one female insurance agent in all of California," says Barry Goldstein, who worked with Seligman at his former law firm. "After a bitter 12-year battle, now more than 50 percent of people being hired are women." Of 45 class action cases that Seligman has worked on, he has lost only two. The winning streak has made Seligman a very rich man--as managing partner at a small Oakland, Calif., law firm, Seligman helped win a $250 million settlement from State Farm Insurance and won a $107 million award against Lucky Stores, a supermarket chain now owned by Albertsons. At the height of his career, Seligman abruptly quit private practice. "I made way more money than I had ever expected or planned to make in my wildest dreams," he says. "And I wanted to get rid of it." He earned no salary from the Impact Fund for the first 10 years but now pays himself $73,000 annually. The fund has granted nearly $4 million to support public-interest law, but just handing out money soon seemed passive to Seligman, and over time he's been pulled back into the courtroom.
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