First BVM Attorney

Mary Liguori Brophy, BVM had an LLB (bachelor of law) from DePaul University, awarded in 1923. She went to work with an assistant state's attorney.

In 1926 she entered the BVM congregation. She was a member of the American Society of International Law and of the Kappa Beta Pi Legal Sorority.

She earned a doctorate in sociology from Catholic University in 1942, and taught sociology first at Clarke College; then, at Mundelein College.

In 1965 she became the first woman guest professor at the Jesuit University of Al Hikam, Baghdad, Iraq, where she taught for a year.

I am a BVM and a lawyer. After several years as a faculty member and administrator at Mundelein College, I started law school in 1986—about the middle of my life/career journey—as a path to working for systemic change in the area of public interest law. After receiving my J.D. degree from Northwestern University School of Law in 1989, I clerked for a United States District Court Judge in Minnesota for two years.

Since 1991, I have practiced plaintiffs' employment law. This means that I represent employees who have been the victims of race, gender and age discrimination and other unfair treatment in the workplace, which includes mis-investment of employee pension or 401k funds, failure to pay overtime, and depriving employees of benefits to which they are entitled.

Class Action Specialization

My law firm, Sprenger & Lang PLLC, specializes in mounting class action cases on behalf of groups of employees against their employers. Sprenger & Lang litigated the class action sexual harassment case on which the movie “ North Country ” was based.

To get additional insights into our work, imagine “Erin Brokovich” except that the plaintiff classes are groups of African Americans, women or older employees who claim they were subject to glass ceilings or unfair stereotypes at companies like Northwest Airlines, Morgan Stanley, Allstate Insurance Company and 3M. (See www.sprengerlang.com to read more about our cases.)

The class action mechanism allows individuals who don't have the same resources or power as their employer to band together and challenge illegal employment practices in their workplace, even against large and powerful employers.

When successful, our clients can require their employer to change the systems that oppressed them (in legal terms, “injunctive relief”). They, and the class they represent, also can receive money damages for the losses they experienced.

It is not unusual for employers to hire large sophisticated law firms to represent them and to fight these cases doggedly. Our firm fronts the considerable plaintiffs' costs for these cases and gets reimbursed costs and attorneys' fees only if we are successful.

All of this makes these lawsuits high stakes, high intensity and high risk. Each case has its own unique life and can take several years to resolve.

We are blessed in having clients with the will and courage to take on their employers and to persevere through this challenging process.

Recent Success

As an example, we recently settled class promotion and compensation claims in a case titled Carlson v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide. The company's business is transportation logistics (using trucks, trains and ships to get other companies' products and materials from one place to another in the world)—a typically male-dominated business.

We filed this lawsuit in 2002 and claimed that women employees were paid less than their male peers and were not promoted to branch manager positions. We also alleged that the workplace was a sexually hostile environment that included viewing of porn on company computers in open workspaces.

The Judge certified promotion and compensation classes but said that the hostile environment claims could not be litigated as a class action. We settled the promotion and compensation class claims in April 2006, the night before the trial was set to begin.

Besides providing monetary relief to the women, the company agreed to provide discrimination training to its employees, add employees to its HR department with responsibility for equal employment opportunity issues at the company, and provide networking and training opportunities for women who aspired to branch manager positions.

While the promotion and compensation claims are resolved, we are now filing multiple lawsuits against the company alleging hostile environment claims on behalf of individuals and smaller groups of women in state and federal courts across the United States.

Zealous Advocacy

My reflections on law and justice are therefore rooted in the practical realities of engaging in what we call “zealous advocacy” for our clients within the legal system. Laws themselves are imperfect because they are a human creation.

State and federal laws like Title VII and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act always have some ambiguity. They are the result of compromise and power imbalances.

The statutory language typically has limitations in expressing the legislative intent clearly, leaving much room for interpretation and always requiring application of the text to the particular facts of a particular case.

Achieving justice for our clients includes not only doing the hard work of assembling the facts showing that an employer engaged in illegal conduct but also making interpretive arguments on issues of what we call “first impression,” and persuading courts that judicial boundaries already drawn on a statute are too narrow.

When an improper judicial interpretation or limitation on a statute becomes so engrained as to constitute “stare decisis” (“to stand by that which is decided”—the principle that prior judicial decisions must be followed by other courts), then we must engage in advocacy for the legislature to tell the courts the proper interpretation by changing the language of the statute.

Judicial Climate

In the last decade plaintiffs' employment law attorneys have experienced substantial hostility from the bench (particularly in federal court).

We often experience what we see as results-oriented decision-making favoring business and undermining the legislative intent underlying civil rights statutes.

This highlights the need for each of us to do what we can to assure that we have a judiciary that applies the law fairly and to elect legislators who will pass laws providing necessary protections to employees that are clear and less vulnerable to partisan interpretation.

The civil rights laws state as a goal to “make whole” employees who have been the victims of illegal employer conduct. That is how plaintiffs' employment law attorneys talk about justice.

Getting there through the judicial system is a formidable challenge, but it a powerful arena where employers can be prodded into doing what is right and where meaningful change on behalf of employees can be achieved.

About the author: Susan Coler, BVM is a partner at Sprenger & Lang PLLC, Minneapolis. She previously was on the music faculty at Mundelein College, Chicago.

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© 2007 Sisters of Charity, BVM