In 2013, a decade into his tenure as managing partner, Steve Brogan turned sixty. He still had time left before he reached the obligatory retirement age of sixty-five, but time flies, and neither Brogan nor his allies wanted him to leave anytime soon. That year, Jones Day’s advisory committee—a group of about sixty partners handpicked by Brogan—extended his reign through 2020. Not long after, the firm’s partners pushed back his mandatory retirement by another two years. The vote was “virtually unanimous,” Joe Sims, a partner at the time, told me. He cited this as proof of Brogan’s broad support, though others saw it as a sign that few lawyers dared to cross him.
The contract extensions—which put Brogan on track to serve a full twenty years as managing partner—erased any doubts about the scope of his authority, including to shape the firm’s culture.
One of Brogan’s long-standing cultural priorities had been to make whining taboo. Just about every time he addressed a large group of partners, Brogan made sure to recite his “no whining” mantra. Sometimes he would project onto a screen a slide with the word “whiners” on a bright red stop sign. Other times “WHINING” would appear inside a red circle with a diagonal line slashing through it, like a cigarette in a no-smoking placard. Brogan even had a “no whining” sign, a gift from McCartan, on display in his office.1
Brogan’s deputies took up his no-whining crusade as their own. Traci Lovitt, a candidate to one day succeed Brogan, once gave a presentation to Jones Day associates that included a slide featuring images from popular movies of characters rolling their eyes.2 “Never be this person,” Lovitt advised. “The ‘eye roll’ associate. The: I hate the coffee; I hate the tea; I hate that we don’t have snacks that I like; I hate the health plan; I really don’t like my office. There are a lot of people who love this place. This kind of eye rolling at the firm trickles up and can harm an otherwise successful career because it is a swipe at something we love: this institution.”
In addition to grumbling about snacks and offices and health plans, the ban on whining applied most obviously to lawyers’ compensation. Even the lowest-paid attorney at Jones Day was earning in the six figures, and the highest-paid were pocketing millions a year. No one was at risk of going hungry. And if they wanted more money, they could always test the waters at a rival firm.
The goal of the “no whining” mandate was to encourage partners to solve problems rather than complain about them, as Lovitt later described it.3 But the policy had other effects as well. One was that, intentionally or not, it sometimes deterred Jones Day employees from speaking up about issues like racial discrimination. Managers would point to the “no whining” policy to deflect grievances. Those who insisted on escalating their complaints risked paying a heavy price.
Deepak Purushothaman was an associate in Jones Day’s office in London. With a specialty in the fast-growing world of asset-based lending, he was on track to become a partner, which had made a certain amount of suffering seem worthwhile.
Over the years, he had stood by silently, a forced smile on his lips, as his colleagues made racist jokes. He had gotten into the habit of collecting the remarks, the slights, the off-color “humor,” documenting much of it in writing. Purushothaman didn’t initially intend to do anything with this growing compendium, but he kept track of it nonetheless, just in case. Sometimes he felt like he was being punished for no reason—like when his mother, who lived in Wales, was dying. Purushothaman started schlepping back and forth between a hospital in Wales and the office in London. On occasion, the long journeys took a little longer than expected, and that caused him to arrive at work late. This didn’t seem like a big deal. He was getting his work done, and this was not a long-term situation. But Purushothaman’s superiors were not sympathetic. They warned that the tardy arrivals might be held against him.
In 2013, Purushothaman complained to one of his bosses about what he felt was a pattern of racism inside Jones Day’s London offices. The complaints were escalated; the response boiled down to: Stop whining. Purushothaman’s managers told him the racist remarks were harmless locker room banter, and what’s more, Purushothaman had laughed along with the jokes, which clearly meant he hadn’t been bothered. Not long afterward, he was taken aside by his managers, who informed him that he was no longer in the running to make partner, and therefore it didn’t make sense for him to stick around. He should look elsewhere for a job.
Purushothaman consulted with outside lawyers, who told him he had a strong case to make that he was the victim of racial discrimination. They advised him to submit a written complaint to the firm about his treatment. So Purushothaman sat down and cataloged the examples of racist behavior he’d endured. Then he compiled examples of women and people of color facing what he viewed as discrimination, calculated the number of racial or ethnic minorities who’d been involuntarily “exited,” and amassed other unpleasant statistics about life for women and nonwhite people in Jones Day’s London offices. He pulled it all together into a lengthy report, which he emailed to multiple Jones Day lawyers, including some who were named in the document as being responsible for the misconduct. He informed his colleagues, including John Phillips, the head of the London office, that he was considering filing a discrimination complaint with the U.K. Employment Tribunal, which adjudicates such cases.
A day or two later, around lunchtime on an autumn day, Jones Day’s local head of litigation burst into Purushothaman’s office. “You are leaving,” he announced. “You are being exited.” The lawyer marched Purushothaman out of the building with whatever he could carry. The rest of his belongings—including paperwork involving his mother’s will, which he hadn’t had time to gather—would be boxed up and sent to him at some point in the future.
In the days that followed, as Purushothaman’s lawyers prepared to file a complaint with the employment tribunal, Jones Day staff searched his computer. On it they found messages that showed that Purushothaman had had a sexual relationship with another associate at the firm. A Jones Day lawyer spoke with Purushothaman’s lawyer and informed him that, if the threatened complaint were to materialize, the evidence of Purushothaman’s affair would likely become public. Might he prefer to make this whole unpleasant situation quietly disappear with a settlement and a confidentiality agreement?
There was nothing improper about the sexual relationship: It was consensual, and Purushothaman wasn’t the woman’s boss or above her in the org chart. But Purushothaman was a private person. And so, just as Jones Day had hoped, he chose Option Two: Make it go away.*
“It was a daily thing, being told what a piece of shit I was,” a former staffer told me. A Cleveland native, he had joined Jones Day’s finance department straight out of college. He wasn’t a lawyer; his job was to compile lawyers’ daily reports on their billable hours, enter them into a spreadsheet, crunch the numbers, make sure clients paid their bills in a timely fashion, and so on.
His boss was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, and he got in the habit of taking out his anger on his subordinates. Sometimes the staffer would make a stupid mistake—adding the wrong column in an Excel spreadsheet, for example—and his boss “would just lose it,” he recalled. The employee was on the receiving end of more borderline-violent tirades than he could count.
One day, the eruption was so severe that it wasn’t borderline. They were in the boss’s office. Very quickly, he went from scowling to ranting to fuming to screaming.
Then the boss swung. He punched the staffer in the chest, hard. The employee was not a small man, but he staggered backward, stunned. He wanted to hit back. He resisted. Then his boss started crying, begging his forgiveness.
It was the staffer’s first job. He’d been advised to suck things up, to roll with the punches. He wanted to keep his job. “So,” he said, “I didn’t tell anyone.”
In 2019, a group of current and former Jones Day associates sued the firm, accusing it of widespread gender discrimination and harassment, of a “fraternity culture,” of being a “male brotherhood.” The lawsuit ticked off one alleged example after another, many involving the firm’s office in Irvine, California.4 (Jones Day denied most of the allegations.) At a work function at a partner’s house, a summer associate in a white dress was shoved into a pool; the man who pushed her allegedly got high fives from Jones Day leadership. Lawyers praised women for being “eye candy.” Others were rebuked for having a “stern face” and told to “smile more.”
Women who complained were derided. When one lawyer in the New York office threatened to sue, a partner warned her that the firm would “drag you through the mud” and “ruin your reputation.”5 Drunken episodes, by contrast, were sometimes dismissed as mild indiscretions. (“You usually have to knock a partner out cold for it to be a career-ending event,” a Jones Day partner once told a reporter.6)
The biggest allegation in the lawsuit was that Jones Day systematically discriminated against women when it came to pay and promotions. The firm denied this—and, as it turned out, the plaintiffs didn’t have the evidence to support the charge. Jones Day pointed out that many of its senior-most lawyers, including those running practice areas and regions, were women and that the firm compared favorably to many of its peers in its support for and advancement of female employees. Jones Day’s confidential compensation data apparently validated the law firm’s claims.
But that didn’t mean that all or even most of the detailed allegations in the lawsuit were false. The lead plaintiff was Nilab Rahyar Tolton. She had joined the Irvine office as an associate after graduating from Harvard Law, where she’d been a 2010 commencement speaker. She was assigned to work with a partner, Paul Rafferty. Tolton is “smart, committed, and exceptionally hard-working,” Rafferty wrote in a 2013 performance review. The next year, he lauded her as “an indispensable cog in my practice [who is] willing to work 24/7 to assist the firm’s clients.” Another largely positive review followed in 2015. She was rewarded with a coveted invite to the “spa day” that the firm held for female clients and a prominent role recruiting and training lawyers.
Yet the firm’s “casual misogyny” made it a difficult place to work, according to the lawsuit. A partner, Eric Landau, kept commenting on Tolton’s looks, comparing her and other women to volleyball players. (At another point, in front of the entire Irvine office, Landau referred to his secretary’s “banging” body in a bikini.)* Rafferty once noted that Tolton was living with her boyfriend and suggested that made it less likely that her boyfriend would want to get married: “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” In a limo to a wine-tasting event, men from the office played the game Fuck, Marry, Kill with Tolton and other women in the car.7 Cary Sullivan, another Jones Day partner, at one point told Tolton to coach another female lawyer on not sounding so “ditzy.”* (In a court filing, Jones Day denied that “the offensive conduct of a few immature junior associates had any impact on [Tolton’s] career at Jones Day or could reasonably be viewed by her or anyone else as representative of the firm’s culture.”)
In 2016, Tolton had a baby and went on maternity leave. That June, as she was preparing to return to work, she received her annual compensation letter in the mail. She was coming off what she thought was a good year and figured the news inside the envelope would validate that. It didn’t. Jones Day informed her that her salary had been frozen.8 Tolton said in a deposition that she went to two of the top partners in the Irvine office. They initially gave her vague positive feedback. Why, then, had her salary been frozen? The men responded that, um, actually, there had been some complaints about her work. Tolton noted that the only thing that had really changed since her prior performance review was that she’d had a baby.
Tolton soon learned that she was pregnant again. She was determined to work as hard as she could before the second baby arrived. She vowed to herself never to turn down an assignment. Jones Day seemed intent on testing her will. She was given jobs that required all-nighters and frequent travel. Tolton reminded her superiors that she was eventually going to need to stop traveling and then would be on leave. Maybe there was someone better to put on these cases? (Jones Day said Tolton was passing up opportunities and shirking responsibilities, part of a pattern of lackluster performance.)
It was a difficult pregnancy. Tolton worked from home in the early mornings and late evenings, switching off the lights to help deal with the nausea. Her doctor told her she needed to slow down; he wrote a note that Tolton shared with the firm. One of the leaders in the Irvine office, Darren Cottriel, summoned Tolton to a conference room. He admonished her for not working hard enough. Tolton kept up her pace, billing about two hundred hours per month from December 2016 through March 2017, when she had her son and went on leave. (Jones Day said it accommodated her as requested by her doctor.)
Tolton was struggling to manage a newborn and a toddler on her own; her partner, a Navy SEAL, was deployed overseas.9 Jones Day informed her that her salary would again be frozen. When she returned in October, Cottriel and Richard Grabowski, who ran the Irvine office, called her in for a performance review. They told her to “look for other opportunities outside the firm.” She had six months to find a new job, they said.
When other lawyers in the office asked what had happened, Tolton said she was being pushed out. Jones Day, up until that point, had been willing to help her find a new job.10 But a few days later, Grabowski and Cottriel called Tolton. She was at home for her son’s birthday party; they were about to sing “Happy Birthday.” Tolton took the call outside so that she wouldn’t disrupt the singing. The men yelled that she was barred from coming back to the office. Her email account was shut down. Their vitriol was so intense that it took Tolton’s breath away.11* She’d never received so much as a speeding ticket; she was not accustomed to people in positions of authority going off on her. As the tirade continued, Tolton leaned against the wall of her house for support. She pressed so hard that it left an imprint on her back.
Tolton and the other women dropped their lawsuit in 2021 after concluding that there wasn’t evidence to support their claims of systematic pay discrimination. There was no settlement announced, leading to widespread speculation that the plaintiffs had simply given up. “What a royal tease,” a Bloomberg columnist wrote, wondering aloud whether the suit had been “a waste of time.”12 She noted that the case had been poised to “end in bright lights shining on the inner workings of a secretive, powerful law firm. So much for that. It promised so much yet delivered so little.”
That wasn’t quite right. A number of the partners who were accused of sexist behavior—including Paul Rafferty and Eric Landau—left the firm. (It isn’t clear whether their departures were related to the allegations.) Jones Day also agreed to pay the plaintiffs an undisclosed amount.* Brogan issued a confidential memo to the firm’s lawyers.13 He trumpeted the end of the lawsuit as a vindication of the firm’s compensation system and of Jones Day’s defiance in the face of an assault from disgruntled workers and their allies in the media: “It is precisely because of the firm’s prominence, its successes, and its willingness to defend unpopular clients and itself that we will continue to be the subject of occasional attacks for wholly unjustified reasons.”