Martha Doty was a featured presenter during the session, "Procedural Strategies for Winning Employment Discrimination Cases: Spotlight on Removal and Summary Judgment," during this conference hosted by the American Conference Institute (ACI). The following topics were covered during the presentation.
Removal
- Countering the naming of individual defendants on bogus claims to avoid removal to federal court and whether Supreme Court decisions in Twombly and Iqbal can stem this trend by plaintiffs’ attorneys
- Applying Iqbal and Twombly to employment discrimination cases
- Developing removal strategies
- when do you make a motion to remove?; pre-lawsuit discussions as sufficient cause for removal; using CAFA as a basis for removal; making a fraudulent joinder motion
Summary Judgment and Dismissal
- Determining whether you are preparing a successful summary judgment motion, or whether your case is destined for trial
- Overcoming the difficult summary judgment standard in discrimination cases (and winning the motion)
- Examples of weak claims surviving summary judgment due to the efforts of good plaintiff lawyers
- Countering plaintiffs who lie, expand their stories, change their stories, never commit to a story, etc. to avoid summary judgment
- Separating the wheat from the chaffe in the plaintiff ’s litany of complaints so as to not bog the courts down in a summary judgment motion, but to focus only on the actionable claims, not the smoke and mirrors
- Positioning discovery so that a viable motion for summary judgment can be made
February 25-26, 2010
Millennium UN Plaza Hotel / New York, NY