Woman Who Sued UBS Aims To Get Back on Wall Street

To Laura Zubulake – who just won a bitter, public three-year legal battle against her former employer, UBS, over allegations she was a victim of sexual discrimination – resuming her career selling Asian stocks is just a matter of hard work and the right connections.“I’ve kept in touch with former colleagues, and I plan to do whatever it takes to restart my career,” she said.But if the stories of others who have taken on Wall Street under far less adversarial conditions are any indication, Ms. Zubulake’s prospects for returning to a trading desk are slim.Ms. Zubulake filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in August 2001, alleging that her boss singled her out for public verbal abuse about her looks and age, saying that she was not attractive or young enough to handle her accounts. She also alleged that her department on two occasions took her clients to adult entertainment clubs and excluded her from the outings.Ms. Zubulake on April 6 was awarded $29.27 million in damages, including $6.83 million in “front pay,” or compensation for future lost income due to UBS’s alleged mistreatment of her. With an income of $650,000 at the time of her dismissal, the jury appeared to have an understanding of just how difficult getting a new job on Wall Street will be, said her lawyer, Liddle & Robinson’s James Hubbard.“The jury saw what her life would be like after this, and they gave her a head start on starting over,” said Mr. Hubbard. While he declined to comment on his client’s job prospects, Mr. Hubbard conceded that Wall Street traditionally shuns those who litigate against it. “There’s a lot of history and tradition in the way.”UBS in an e-mailed statement said it plans to appeal the jury’s verdict. “We do not agree with the excessive amounts awarded and will demonstrate that the liability and compensatory awards should be reconsidered by the courts and rejected,” UBS said.“UBS is committed to its diversity efforts and will continue to ensure that it has an open and diverse work environment with a commitment to equal opportunity in the workplace.”While Ms. Zubulake plans to resume her career on Wall Street, many who have fought Wall Street have given up, finding that doors are shut and phone calls unreturned.A former Morgan Stanley senior convertible bond saleswoman, Allison Schieffelin, who received $12 million last July in a settlement with the firm over what she alleged was the firm’s discriminatory promotion practices, recently scrapped her attempt to land another job on Wall Street, according to an individual familiar with her plans. Ms. Schieffelin, who was earning over $1 million annually when she filed her suit, will likely be heading back to work in a family-run business in Connecticut, said another source.The problem with hiring high-profile litigants – in the thinking of senior Wall Street management – is that the employee will always be “the person who sued their last employer and was all over the papers” and never just a good banker or salesman, said Gatfield-Greenwich principal, Barbara Gatfield, who has recruited bond and derivative executives for 20 years. She said firms often hire prospective employees who have private arbitrations over salary disputes pending against former employers, but would draw the line at someone involved in a public litigation.“Wall Street managements have a clear sense of public and private. Anything that draws attention to how they make their money is going to be a big problem,” she said.One argument for hiring someone who has sued an employer over allegations of wrongdoing is that the employee probably has a well-defined sense of integrity. At least that’s what former BNP Paribas investment-grade bond research chief Dan Scotto says he used to think. Mr. Scotto – who claims he was fired by the bank for writing a negative research report on Enron bonds in August 2001, just prior to the company’s collapse – said that his call should have earned him plaudits. “I sat in front of the phone and awaited calls from those who might have appreciated research independence. The silence was deafening.”BNP Paribas, which has repeatedly said that it terminated Mr. Scotto for performance reasons, not for his downgrade of Enron, did not return a call for comment.Mr. Scotto said that what scared competitors away from hiring him – despite his annual first-place ranking in the widely followed Institutional Investor All-American bond research team poll for nine years – was a bitter arbitration, during which Mr. Scotto alleged BNP tolerated superiors’ discrimination against him for being gay, and BNP counterclaimed that Mr. Scotto was incompetent.“I had become toxic, since no one wanted anyone talking about research conflict of interest in September 2001,” he said.Mr. Scotto reached a settlement with BNP and declined to discuss his case, citing a gag order.There is a happy ending of sorts for Mr. Scotto, who has launched a successful consulting operation out of his Greenwich, Conn. home, Whitehall Financial Advisory LLC. Asked whether he thought it was worth it and if he would do it again, he said, “I doubt it. The cost has been huge, and I’m not sure I changed anything. I’m not sure I want to be a hero, since the cemetery is full of them.”

Woman Who Sued UBS Aims To Get Back on Wall Street

Woman Who Sued UBS Aims To Get Back on Wall Street

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