Judge tosses ADA suit against BigLaw firms, cites plaintiff's 'outright speculation'
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit (PDF) contending that BigLaw firms’ reliance on law school rankings in hiring discriminated against the disabled.
U.S. District Judge Gerald Pappert of Philadelphia tossed the suit by William Joseph Hanrahan in an Oct. 2 decision, the Legal Intelligencer reports. The decision is a victory for the defendants: Pepper Hamilton; Blank Rome and Dechert. In a separate order, Pappert dismissed Hanrahan’s suit against Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, saying it was moot.
Hanrahan, who has Asperger’s syndrome and a nonverbal learning disability, attended Drexel University’s law school. He sued for disparate impact discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act after failing to obtain a 2014 summer associate position, despite a No. 4 class rank.
Hanrahan had claimed disabled individuals had trouble gaining admission to higher-ranked schools because of rules governing accommodations on the Law School Admission Test. In the past, many disabled applicants taking the LSAT were denied accommodations or, if accommodated, the fact was noted when scores were provided to law schools. Hanrahan says. (Accommodations have since been expanded and are no longer flagged.)
Hanrahan says he was entitled to an LSAT accommodation but he didn’t request it because he didn’t want it disclosed.
Hanrahan’s theory, Pappert said, “rests on numerous assumptions, presumptions, conclusions, outright speculation, and fairly wide leaps of faith.”
Pappert describes the theory this way: “The law firms prefer to hire students from Temple Law and Penn Law over students from Drexel Law; if Hanrahan sought the accommodations to which he was allegedly entitled when sitting for the LSAT, he would have received a higher score on the exam; if he received a higher score on the exam, he would have been accepted at Temple Law and would have applied to, and then been accepted by, Penn Law; if he had attended Temple or Penn Law, he would have done just as well academically as he did at Drexel Law; and if he performed as well at Temple or Penn as he did at Drexel, the law firms would have offered him a job.”
Pappert outlined two reasons why Hanrahan’s suit failed. First, Pappert said, Hanrahan had failed to identify a specific employment practice or policy that caused a discriminatory hiring pattern. “Simply because he refers to his own generalized observation as a ‘practice’ or ‘policy’ does not make it so,” Pappert said.
Second, Pappert said, Hanrahan failed to offer statistics showing how the policy caused discrimination. Hanrahan cited statistics showing Drexel had a slightly higher percentage of disabled law students (3.3 percent) than Temple or Pennsylvania law schools (2.2 percent and .1 percent, respectively). Pappert cited several problems with those statistics, including a failure to establish the disparity was substantial.
Another problem was that Hanrahan claimed law firms favor Temple and Penn law students, which, if true, means the law firms also favor disabled students at those schools. Forty-four percent of the disabled students at those schools in 2013-14 attended Drexel, while 56 percent attended Temple and Penn.
