Sidley Drops Arbitration Demand for Would-Be Associates

Sidley Austin has become the latest Big Law firm to drop a requirement that associates agree to arbitrate disputes as a condition of employment, the firm has confirmed.

Sidley’s action comes in the wake of Kirkland & Ellis’s recent move to no longer require associates to sign similar agreements.

Kirkland acted after pressure from a group of Harvard Law School students, who had urged prospective summer associates to refrain from applying to the firm as long as the policy was in place.

Critics of mandatory arbitration clauses say they effectively force employees to sign away their rights to go to court if they ever experience illegal treatment in the workplace. They say that victims of harassment or discrimination, for example, are limited in the legal remedies they can use to address the wrongdoing.

Sidley’s move is also significant because unlike the policy change at Kirkland, it applies to all associates, as well as non-attorney staffers.

“We’re really pleased that firms like Sidley Austin recognize that dropping forced arbitration is the right thing to do for all of their employees,” Vail Kohnert-Yount, a Harvard Law student, said in a press release from the student group, called the Pipeline Parity Project.

“Hopefully, the lawyers at these firms will also rethink compelling these types of coercive contracts on behalf of their clients, because it’s obvious that forced arbitration impedes access to justice,” said Kohnert-Yount.

The law student campaigns started in late March after a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law tweeted pictures of Munger, Tolles & Olson’s employee arbitration agreements. The professor, Ian Samuel, noted that incoming summer associates at Munger Tolles who wished to bring sexual harassment claims could do so through arbitration but not in court.

A day later, the firm stopped its use of the arbitration clauses.

With assistance from Stephanie Russell-Kraft