Ex-Reed Smith Partner Claims 80% Sex-Based Pay Disparity (1)

A former Reed Smith partner who claims the firm underpaid her by up to 80% compared with male colleagues faced a New Jersey appeals panel skeptical that a new state law can get her six years of damages.

Former non-equity partner Sherri A. Affrunti argued her own appeal Tuesday, urging the New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division to let her sue her former bosses over six years of compensation instead of the six months Reed Smith says are at issue.

The judges expressed doubt over whether that was possible, given recent state Supreme Court rulings limiting retroactive application of employment law claims. This appeal will steer a case that could give a black eye to the national firm if broader pay disparities are found, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars of damages.

“The Legislature was putting employers on notice that from this point forward you’d be subject to a six-year lookback,” Judge Thomas W. Sumners Jr. said. “Why should an employer be responsible for six years prior if they were not told they could be liable six years prior?”

Affrunti said there is “clear pay inequity” at the firm. “I have evidence that I was paid between 20 to 50 cents on the dollar that men in the firm, just in Princeton, were paid,” she said.

Retroactivity

The case highlights a key ambiguity baked in to the state’s expansive Diane B. Allen Equal Pay Act. and the interplay between statutes of limitations and lookback periods, which are used to calculate damages.

Though that 2018 law expands the state’s Law Against Discrimination to cover unequal pay for people in protected classes—such as women earning less than men—the law didn’t say it applied retroactively.

With that ambiguity, the big New Jersey firms at the time reached out to their clients and warned them that they should undergo pay disparity calculations in order to avoid suits looking back years. That includes treble damages, which in Affrunti’s case could hypothetically reach over $1 million.

Even if she has evidence, Reed Smith argues the lookback period for her fair pay claims should be the few months before she left the firm in 2019, and the 1,500-lawyer international firm shouldn’t have to give her information on pay across the global enterprise.

Discovery

A 2024 New Jersey Supreme Court ruling prohibits courts, except in rare circumstances, from retroactively opening New Jersey employers to liability, said Sean P. Joyce, Reed Smith’s lawyer.

“New Jersey court have repeatedly construed language that an act is to be effective immediately or at a future date to indicate prospective application,” said Joyce, an attorney at Carmagnola & Ritardi.

The judges seemed more open to reversing the trial courts limitations on Affrunti’s discovery into the pay of the roughly 400 Reed Smith US non-equity partners.

Joyce argued that a firm committee made each non-equity partner’s compensation package based on individual factors. Affrunti argued that the law guarantees discovery into a workers’ cohort, and she’s entitled to dig into whether she’s underpaid compared to male partners in this nationwide class of workers.

“There could, theoretically, be gender discrimination, and discovery is simply to obtain things that could lead to admissible evidence,” Judge Mark K. Chase said.

The case is Affrunti v. Reed Smith LLP, N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div., No. A-002477-24, oral argument held 10/7/25.