The Trials and Tribulations of Women Litigators | The 2020 Shapiro Lecture
Featuring Roberta Liebenberg, Partner at Fine Kaplan & Black
February 13, 2020
12:45 – 2:00 p.m.
Boston University School of Law
765 Commonwealth Ave
Barristers Hall
This year’s 2020 Shapiro Lecture speaker is Roberta Liebenberg, a partner at Fine, Kaplan and Black in Philadelphia, who focuses her practice on antitrust and class actions. Her work, “First Chairs at Trial: More Women Need Seats at the Table,” co-authored with Stephanie Scharf, addresses the many challenges and barriers confronting women litigators. Liebenberg and Scharf’s statistical findings found that women are underrepresented in lead roles in civil litigation, particularly MDL litigation, class actions, and other high-stakes commercial matters.
Liebenberg will review the statistical findings of her co-authored study, and discuss the myriad of reasons why a pronounced gender disparity exists in the courtroom. She will offer concrete strategies and best practices that can be utilized by law firms, clients, judges, and individual women lawyers to increase the number of women in lead counsel positions.
About the Speaker:
Roberta Liebenberg, a partner at Fine Kaplan & Black in Philadelphia, focuses her practice on antitrust and class actions. She has been appointed by courts to represent plaintiff classes in many class actions. Liebenberg is now Lead Counsel for the End Payer Plaintiff class in the Generic Pharmaceuticals Pricing Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 2724 (E.D. Pa.), which is the largest pending antitrust MDL in the country. She also currently serves as co-lead for the class in In re Railway Industry Employee No-Poach Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 2850 (W.D. Pa.). She was one of the trial counsel for the class in the Urethanes Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 1616 (D. Kan.), where a $1.06 billion judgment was entered against Dow Chemical Company after a four-week jury trial. The judgment was affirmed by the Tenth Circuit, and during Dow’s appeal to the Supreme Court, it settled for $835 million, the most ever obtained from a single defendant in a price-fixing case. She has also defended Fortune 500 companies, including Southwest Airlines, in class actions and other complex commercial litigation.
Ms. Liebenberg has chaired numerous organizations devoted to gender equality in the profession, including the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, the ABA Gender Equity Task Force, the ABA Presidential Initiative on Achieving Long-Term Careers for Women in Law, DirectWomen (the only organization devoted to increasing the number of women attorneys on corporate boards), and more. In these leadership roles, she spearheaded a number of initiatives, studies, and publications concerning the gender pay gap, the under-representation of women lawyers in equity partnerships and positions of power and influence, implicit bias, sexual harassment, and myriad other issues of importance to women lawyers.
Working in collaboration with Stephanie Scharf, Ms. Liebenberg has been at the vanguard of cutting-edge research addressing the dearth of women in lead roles at trial (“First Chairs at Trial-More Women Need Seats at the Table”) and the high rates of attrition of experienced women lawyers from private practice (“Walking out the Door: The Facts, Figures, and Future of Experienced Women Lawyers in Private Practice”). In those groundbreaking publications, Ms. Scharf and Ms. Liebenberg provide concrete best practices and solutions to create a more level playing field for women lawyers.