A new lawsuit filed against the white-shoe firm of Davis Polk alleges the firm participated in racial discrimination and then retaliated against the associate who complained.
The plaintiff is former associate Kaloma Caldwell, who began at the firm in 2012 as a summer associate and then was a lawyer at the firm from 2014 to 2018 and worked in various corporate groups during his time there. According to the complaint, as an African-American, Caldwell was concerned about the firm’s lack of diversity before he began at Davis Polk, but new initiatives at the firm and assurances from leadership that black associates would have opportunities to excel at the firm convinced him to accept the job. However, Caldwell alleges a firm culture that allowed implicit biases to flourish, and minimized opportunities for black associates to advance at Davis Polk. Caldwell alleges that as an associate at the firm, he was regularly left off of team emails for deals he was assigned to and was not invited to participate in conference calls. He also says that more experienced attorneys at the firm would ignore diverse associates, even avoiding eye contact with them.
Caldwell says he complained about the discrimination and implicit bias at the firm on numerous occasions, but rather than fix the problem, it made it worse. Caldwell alleges that the firm actually doctored performance reviews — in the words of the complaint, they were “retroactively created after Plaintiff engaged litigation” — to manufacture a reason to fire him after he complained about the alleged discrimination. Caldwell says that in addition to these negative performance reviews that were inconsistent with the feedback he received in real time, he was increasingly isolated, and not given any work, which the complaint describes as a “barrage of direct and indirect forms of harassment and humiliation.”
Davis Polk has not yet issued a comment about the litigation
Davis Polk Hit With Racial Discrimination Lawsuit
bu bu bu string just didn't work hard enough. y'all nikkas sound like white supremacists
The plaintiff is former associate Kaloma Caldwell, who began at the firm in 2012 as a summer associate and then was a lawyer at the firm from 2014 to 2018 and worked in various corporate groups during his time there. According to the complaint, as an African-American, Caldwell was concerned about the firm’s lack of diversity before he began at Davis Polk, but new initiatives at the firm and assurances from leadership that black associates would have opportunities to excel at the firm convinced him to accept the job. However, Caldwell alleges a firm culture that allowed implicit biases to flourish, and minimized opportunities for black associates to advance at Davis Polk. Caldwell alleges that as an associate at the firm, he was regularly left off of team emails for deals he was assigned to and was not invited to participate in conference calls. He also says that more experienced attorneys at the firm would ignore diverse associates, even avoiding eye contact with them.
Caldwell says he complained about the discrimination and implicit bias at the firm on numerous occasions, but rather than fix the problem, it made it worse. Caldwell alleges that the firm actually doctored performance reviews — in the words of the complaint, they were “retroactively created after Plaintiff engaged litigation” — to manufacture a reason to fire him after he complained about the alleged discrimination. Caldwell says that in addition to these negative performance reviews that were inconsistent with the feedback he received in real time, he was increasingly isolated, and not given any work, which the complaint describes as a “barrage of direct and indirect forms of harassment and humiliation.”
Davis Polk has not yet issued a comment about the litigation
Davis Polk Hit With Racial Discrimination Lawsuit
bu bu bu string just didn't work hard enough. y'all nikkas sound like white supremacists
I know a black sista who works at Davis Polk & Wardwell.
