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May 8, 2008 12:55 PM
Former Bingham McCutchen Associate Says She Was Drugged at Holiday Party
Posted by Brian Baxter
As reported by The Boston Globe, a former Bingham McCutchen associate filed a complaint yesterday with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the state's chief civil rights agency, alleging that Bingham ignored her allegation that she had been drugged at a firm holiday party.
According to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Am Law Daily, former litigation associate Michelle Moor says a firm lawyer and an HR manager mishandled charges she raised with them relating to alleged instances of drugging of firm employees, and rape. More details from the complaint appear below.
Bingham McCutchen has responded to Moor's action, saying there is no merit to her claims, and expressing disappointment in Moor's resignation from the firm (Moor resigned in late February, claiming in her complaint that she was concerned for her safety.) In a statement released today by firm spokesperson Claire Papanastasiou, Bingham says that it is working with a safety expert to provide employees with personal-safety training.
We took Ms. Moor's report extremely seriously. . . . Ordinarily we do not comment further in connection with ongoing disputes. Here, because issues of personal safety are implicated, we comment further to address only that matter.
[Moor's] filing speaks of the report received by the firm that Ms. Moor unknowingly ingested a drug at a holiday party sponsored by the firm in a public setting. The firm believes that at all times it acted diligently, responsibly, and fairly in connection with information it received, including gathering relevant facts and conducting an appropriate and thorough investigation.
The safety of our lawyers and staff is of paramount concern to our firm.
Still, the complaint details some troubling allegations.
Moor claims that after a holiday lunch at Lucia restaurant in Boston's North End on December 14, 2007, at which she had two glasses of wine, she became "extremely disoriented" and decided to go to an emergency room. Blood tests taken revealed traces of Tegretol, an anticonvulsant known to cause memory loss when ingested with alcohol.
According to the complaint, Moor says she reported the incident to a senior associate, who said she had also been drugged and raped by an unidentified Bingham employee a year earlier but that she chose not to report the incident because she felt it would hurt her partnership prospects.
Moor says she then reported the matter to her mentor at the firm, Louis Rodriquez, the cochair of Bingham's labor and employment group, as well as to Lynn Carroll, the firm's chief human resources officer. Moor claims Carroll and Rodriquez said they would investigate the incident but made little headway in the following weeks.
On January 17, 2008, Moor says in the complaint, she was invited to a dinner at another Boston restaurant, Grill 23, to celebrate the dismissal of a case Bingham was handling. Three other Bingham lawyers were in attendance, as was a member of the firm's litigation technology department. Moor alleges that the litigation tech specialist, whom The Am Law Daily is declining to name, boasted at the party that he "enjoyed having sex with women . . . who were unconscious," and that "he knew how to get 'roofies.'" ("Roofies" is a slang term for the date-rape drug Rohypnol.)
Moor's complaint says she left the dinner in tears and later reported what was said to Carroll. She alleges that other lawyers at the dinner corroborated her recollection of events; one lawyer, Moor says in her complaint, allegedly said the offending individual had made similar statements in the past. Moor claims Bingham offered to move her office to another floor where she wouldn't be near the litigation tech specialist. But Moor says in the complaint that she didn't want to be moved away from her colleagues in the litigation department. Despite her efforts to avoid the litigation tech specialist, she claims, she continued to feel unsafe at work.
After several meetings with Bingham management, Moor says in the complaint, Bingham informed her in late February 2008 that the individual from litigation support no longer worked for the firm. But Moor chose to leave the firm that same month. In the complaint, she claims she was subsequently informed by Bingham that she could not sue the firm because of a clause in her employment contract. (Moor is now an associate with Kotin, Crabtree & Strong in Boston.)
A short biography on Kotin Crabtree's Web site says Moor worked in the Peace Corps in the Ivory Coast before graduating from Northeastern University School of Law in 2007. Moor did not return a phone call seeking comment and her lawyer, Rachel Stroup, a litigation associate at Boston firm Zalkind, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan, also declined to comment.
Download moor_complaint_filed_5708.pdf
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