Counsel for a large technology and entertainment company engaged CRA’s Labor & Employment practice to review and respond to a plaintiff expert’s report in a class-action matter involving allegations of pay discrimination under the California Equal Pay Act (EPA), as well as failure to promote claims.
CRA conducted a comprehensive review of the plaintiffs’ expert’s report, as well as the underlying data and documents. An expert report from CRA’s Jora Stixrud demonstrated that the plaintiff expert’s analyses and conclusions had multiple key flaws, rendering the findings and conclusions unreliable, inaccurate and misleading. These included “cherry-picking” the data to only analyze the subset that supported their conclusions, while ignoring the majority of the data.
When the data was analyzed holistically, all of the pay and promotion outcomes were statistically neutral or favorable to women. Moreover, there were mistakes in the data building and construction, as well as the statistical modeling, that made even the cherry-picked results inaccurate and unreliable. Finally, none of the named plaintiffs were good representatives for either the pay or promotions subclasses that the plaintiff’s expert attempted to define.
The court ultimately excluded the plaintiffs’ expert’s report and denied the plaintiff’s motion for class certification.
