Piper Alderman heads to mediation in dispute with female partner accused of bullying

Business of Law 2019-03-01 9:16 pm By Christine Caulfield | Melbourne

A senior female partner at Piper Alderman will go into mediation this week with representatives of the firm’s partnership to try to resolve her sex discrimination lawsuit, which alleges a group of equity partners have used baseless complaints of bullying to try to push her out.

The parties will go into mediation before Federal Court of Sydney Registrar Susan O’Connor on Tuesday, just two weeks after the partner, Lexia Wilson, lodged her complaint and secured an emergency injunction preventing Piper Alderman’s leaders from meeting to vote her off the partnership.

The mediation session comes after a heated interlocutory hearing last week before Justice John Nicholas to extend the injunction, in which Wilson’s barrister, Christopher Ward, SC, accused the firm of “skulduggery” in its efforts to expel his client.

Wilson’s suit, which names national managing partner Tony Britten-Jones, chairman of partners Gordon Grieve and Piper Alderman’s 48 other senior partners as respondents, alleges sex discrimination under the Australian Human Rights Commission Act.

According to Ward, there is a “concerted effort” by a small subset of the partners, including Britten-Jones and Grieve, to oust her on the false grounds that they had received complaints against her of bullying from two as yet unnamed individuals at the firm.

“My client is, on any view of it, a strong female partner in a leadership position. She has been treated differently to male partners who have faced similar allegations. The only difference between them is sex,” Ward said.

Piper Alderman had also made efforts to steal a major client she brought to the firm, Ward said, allegedly trying to conceal the client’s name from the records so Wilson would not be aware other partners were working on the company’s matters.

Wilson is a Sydney-based real estate partner recruited by Piper Alderman from Norton Rose in March 2012. She was appointed member of the senior leaders group in 2016 and stepped into the role of deputy managing partner in July 2017.

“[There was a] concerted effort to remove both my client from the partnership both on improper grounds and to ensure that her client base is siphoned off without her knowledge,” Ward said.

Piper Alderman’s barrister Kate Eastman, SC, told Justice Nicholas at the hearing that the firm had lost trust and confidence in Wilson and saw “no solution other than the expulsion from the partnership”.

Wilson’s continued presence caused stress, fear and anxiety among those partners and other employees because of the “volatility that’s been unleashed” in the course of the dispute, Eastman said.

“The firm is right to be concerned about the impact on those individuals and the extent to which the partnership is able to manage the impact of the applicant’s presence in the workplace.”

Any allegations that the firm was siphoning off Wilson’s clients were “scandalous, unfounded and untested”, Eastman added.

Piper Alderman said in a statement it did “not tolerate inappropriate workplace behaviour of any kind”.

“We believe that everyone in the firm is entitled to come to work confident that it is a safe environment and that inappropriate behaviour is unacceptable. Where we identify bullying or other inappropriate work practices, we take action,” Grieve said.

Justice Nicholas has reserved judgment on Wilson’s injunction application.

Clyde & Co. is representing the partners. Mills Oakley is representing Wilson.

The case is Lexia Wilson v Tony Britten-Jones & Ors.