Meet the Grande Dame of SLAPP herself!
Lynne Charlotte Hermle
Employment Defense; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe: Menlo Park, CA
"With more than 15 trials and no losses under her belt, Lynne Hermle has established a reputation for being a take-no-prisoners employment lawyer who makes every attempt to knock out parts of a case before they reach a jury.
"If you aren't ready to do battle the second you file a complaint against her, you are at a disadvantage," warns San Mateo plaintiffs attorney Paul J. Smoot. "Right out of the gate, before she's even filed a responsive pleading , she's already preparing her motion for summary judgment."
Hermle says that her career path--from small-firm attorney in the early 1980s, when most employment claims were administrative, to in-house counsel at AT&T, and finally to the employment litigation department at Orrick--engendered the aggressive style that has become her trademark.
"I saw a lot of what I thought was bad handling of employment litigation," she says. "I see a lot of cases that are not aggressively handled, and some cases that are overly aggressively handled with respect to syle and not substance. In employment cases the emotional issues are intense, and those emotional issues push the clients toward wanting a very aggressive response."
Hermle, has handled jury trials for corporate clients, which have included Macy's, Apple Computer, and IBM. Adam Pomerantz, who manages half of IBM's employment litigation nationwide, says he saw Hermle educate a judge who lacked familiarity with certain aspects of employment law and procedure. "Without diminishing the talents of our judge, Hermle taught the judge pertinent aspects of California employment law, and I know the judge thought very highly of her both during and after the trial," Pomerantz says.
Pomerantz also reports that Hermle is "particularly useful when we have a male attorney on the other side. She turns them into putty as far as I can tell."
Louisa Holzschuher, senior counsel of human resources law at Apple Computer, is another fan. She says that Hermle is legendary at Apple for her courtroom performance, and Holzschuher notes one employment case in particular: "She actually had the plaintiff's lawyer throwing up in the bathroom every morning, he was so freaked-out about the case, and this happened day after day, through all the motions. The plaintiff and her lawyer actually agreed to withdraw from the lawsuit after Hermle's opening statement."
Gators - a dozen litigators with bite, California Lawyer, May 2001
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