Perkins Coie Hires Investigator for Counsel’s Harassment Claims

Perkins Coie hired an outside investigator to look into allegations that a former partner harassed a junior lawyer by spreading false rumors about her and dragging her into a marital dispute.

Seattle-based litigation counsel Breanna Philips claimed in a social media post Perkins Coie treated her harassment allegations against an unnamed female partner with “hostility” before retaining a third-party investigator. Philips’ claim that the firm retained an outside investigator was confirmed by a person briefed on the matter who was granted anonymity to freely discuss internal firm deliberations.

Philips, in a LinkedIn post this week, claimed that the female partner accused her husband, a former partner at the firm, of having an affair with Philips during a “marital spat.” Philips said she learned of this accusation a month after the same unnamed female partner, who was also Philips’ supervisor, allegedly spread a rumor that Philips had been sexually assaulted by a partner at the firm.

“My direct supervisor had now sexualized me two times (first the assault rumor, second, the affair lie), and I felt very uncomfortable,” Philips recounted on LinkedIn this week. “I told HR, and they told me not to do anything. I believed I was waiting on an investigation.”

Philips didn’t immediately return a request for further comment on Thursday. Perkins Coie responded to questions about Philips’ claims with an email statement.

“Perkins Coie has long sought to foster an inclusive workplace that values a broad array of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences,” the firm said Thursday. “When an employee raises a concern with HR, it is fully investigated, including in some cases by a third party, and appropriate action taken.”

Philips was an associate at the time of the alleged harassment and was promoted to counsel in January, according to her LinkedIn profile. The unnamed female partner who, according to Philips, made the false allegations left Perkins Coie this year of her own accord due to an unrelated reason, said the person briefed on the matter.

Philips took to LinkedIn this week to detail the allegations of misconduct she’s reportedly been raising for months at the firm.

In October, Philips said she received an email from the husband of her supervising partner accusing her and another lawyer of spreading false rumors of extramarital affairs. The husband had left his role as a partner at the firm at this point, referring to the atmosphere at Perkins Coie as “small, sad and toxic.”

“If you knew anything significant about my life—which you obviously don’t—you would know that my having or scoping out an affair is about as plausible as my being one of the people who robbed the Louvre,” the husband said in the October email. Philips attached the email, sent to her work email address, to her LinkedIn post with some redactions.

Philips said she then called the supervising partner and her husband for answers. That’s when she learned that her supervising partner accused her husband of having an affair with Philips, according to Philips’ account.

A month earlier, Philips said the same unnamed female partner spread a false rumor that Philips had been sexually assaulted by an unnamed partner in another group at the firm. Philips said she raised both issues with the firm’s human resources department.

“There was not an actual investigation into these events,” Philips said this week. “Instead, HR met my complaints with hostility and took the position that none of this had happened. A third-party investigator is finally involved, but only because I kept pushing.”

The investigation occurs on the eve of Perkins Coie’s merger with Ashurst, an elite UK law firm promising Perkins a deeper presence in global markets. The merger is expected to result in an approximately $2.8 billion, 3,000-lawyer operation by the third quarter of the year.

Philips represents companies in the e-commerce, aviation, and consumer product industries in state and federal courts, her firm profile says. She said in her LinkedIn post she hopes Perkins’ tie-up with Ashurst will move the firm to live up to the merging firms’ tagline of being the “firm of tomorrow.”