They’ve Got Next: Labor & Employment Fresh Face Laura Iris Mattes

Not long after joining Outten & Golden, associate Laura Iris Mattes read the viral blog post, written by a former Uber Technologies Inc. engineer, that detailed claims of unfair treatment and harassment against women and people of color at the ride-hailing giant.

Mattes said Susan Fowler’s now-famous post, paired with regular news reports about Uber’s alleged toxic culture led her and fellow attorneys in the San Francisco office of the plaintiffs-side firm to be concerned about potential systemic discrimination issues at the technology company.

Mattes was attracted to the legal industry to address scenarios such as these, she said. During her time as a Fulbright research scholar, she studied human rights in Romania where she lived as a child before moving to California. From that experience, as well as time she spent in Columbia, she decided she wanted to pursue law to tackle injustice.

Working with firm associate Rachel Dempsey and partner Jahan Sagafi, Mattes was part of a team that launched a class action on behalf of women and engineers of color at Uber that led to a $10-million settlement finalized in November 2018. The agreement mandated changes to the company to prevent discrimination in the future, including overhauling its pay and promotion system, and requiring a three-year monitoring period. Uber didn’t admit to liability on any of the allegations.

Mattes joined Outten & Golden’s San Francisco office in 2016, after completing her law degree at the University of California, Berkeley and a clerkship in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. She previously was one of the firm’s earliest law clerks in the then-newly formed California office.

More recently, Mattes worked on a case against PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP that involved largely untested theories under federal age discrimination law. In March 2020, Outten & Golden reached a settlement agreement that would require PwC to pay $11.6 million and implement various changes to their hiring policies. The class action accused the company of using tactics, such as on-campus college recruitment, that had a disproportionately negative impact on older job applicants.

A California judge in that case agreed with the legal theory advanced by the plaintiffs that applicants, not just current employees, could bring disparate impact claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, even though two federal appeals courts have ruled differently.

“Iris is a brilliant, creative, committed attorney with really impressive entrepreneurial vision and energy,” Sagafi said in an interview. “Her ability to identify new claims and case ideas is awesome.”

Another example of creative strategy has played out in ongoing wage-and-hour claims against Lyft Inc., Uber’s chief competitor. Mattes has filed thousands of individual arbitration demands on behalf of drivers, since a 2018 California Supreme Court ruling created a stricter standard for determining if workers should be independent contractors.

The arbitration demands argue Lyft should classify workers as employees, entitled to minimum wage and overtime. She said they regularly file them in batches, between 25 to 400 at a time. This mass arbitration strategy has taken hold in California with plaintiffs’ firms, including Outten & Golden, and has led to millions in filing fees alone.

“I really do enjoy those cases because I think one of the unstated goals of arbitration was to prevent people from asserting their rights,” she said. “It’s not easy, but it’s gratifying to hold their feet to the fire and meet them on their own terms.”