If you have read the previous post, and decided that suing is for you despite all the drawbacks, your next step is to find a good lawyer. I had an absolute nightmare of a time trying to find a lawyer (and, because my first attorney fell gravely ill, I had to go through the process twice).
The problem in finding a discrimination lawyer when you work for a university (particularly state universities) is that lawyers know that the universities have infinitely deep litigation pockets (at least compared to the Plaintiff). Thus the attorneys know that the likelihood that the Plaintiff will be able to monetarily survive long enough in the lawsuit to actually prevail is probably pretty low. So they really don't want to take such cases. They would rather litigate discrimination lawsuits against small companies and the like, where the chances of coming to a quick conclusion that puts money in their pockets is much higher.
Thus, I was rejected outright by many, many law firms. They simply told me"we don't deal with cases against the state", and that was the end of that. Many, many lawfirms also wouldn't return my calls when I would leave a description of my case with their intake receptionist. It was beyond frustrating.
I eventually did find a lawyer in the venerable Eleanor Jackson Piel (Eleanor represented Cynthia Fisher during her seminal case, Fisher v Vassar College (see the previous post for more information on that)).
Unfortunately, some months after being retained by me, Eleanor fell gravely ill and I was forced to go through the whole nasty process once again of finding a lawyer. This time I was wiser, but sad that I could not fight my lawsuit with someone like Eleanor at my side; if you ever need an attorney, may you be so blessed to find someone even remotely like Eleanor Jackson Piel. Eleanor has been a bulldog advocate for human rights for many decades, and I feel honored to know her.
The second time around searching for a lawyer, I took advantage of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER ) system. The PACER web pages are very cheap to view, and allow you to view all documents that have been filed for all federal court cases in America. To get started with PACER you need to create an account, which involves giving them a credit card number to which to bill the page charges. No need to worry about huge extraneous charges...there aren't any. I have looked at a *lot* of documents on PACER, and the total charges so far after about a year are something like $65, which is a drop in the bucket considering the wealth of information I have learned from searches using the system, and also considering how much I pay my lawyer ($350 per hour).
To find a lawyer who was knowledgeable about academic law and who had a good track record litigating against her university, I simply figured out which US federal court district I was in, then used the PACER online database to search for previous federal discrimination lawsuits against my university. The PACER system told me which lawsuits against my university were won, lost, settled, or still ongoing. The PACER system also told me the name and full contact information of all the attorneys involved in each case.
So, it is a simple process to pick the lawyers who have fought cases that have won against your university.
Also, the full details of each case (called the Plaintiff's "Complaint") are available off of PACER for pretty much every lawsuit. The Complaint details everything the Plaintiff has to say about how the university did her wrong, and it is usually the first document filed in a court case. The university's responses to each complaint (called, appropriately enough, the "Response") are also available. It will probably be very helpful to you to read all the Complaints and all the Responses for each case against your university. It will give you a pretty good idea of the tactics the university has been using to fight such cases (and leave you wiser as to how to go about possibly avoiding them as you write your own Complaint).
Note that the PACER system charges you 8 cents a page to view these documents, which I think is a very reasonable price. Be sure to copy the PDF files of the documents you view to your computer such that if you need to look at them again you won't have to pay another 8 cents per page.
Also, and this is up to you, you might consider contacting some of the Plaintiffs in ongoing lawsuits against your university. I have noticed that universities seem to take the divide and conquer route by acting like your lawsuit is the first that has ever been filed in their utopian work enviroment. The other complainants will probably be in departments other than yours, but it will really help to chat with them anyway. And you will almost certainly find that they are very grateful to find that someone gives enough of a damn about their case to actually contact them about it. Be sure to be up front with them about how you found out about their case.
A tip: if you can't find your university in PACER using one moniker, like, for instance, University of California at Berkeley, try just looking for Berkeley. I found federal lawsuits against my university listed under about four different monikers.
Another tip: if you still can't find any federal discrimination lawsuits against your university, make sure you got the district court right. Sometimes it can be confusing, particularly if there is more than one district in your state.
And a final tip: if you *still* can't find any listings of federal discrimination lawsuits against your university, pick another university in your town or nearby in your state, and find a lawyer who has successfully litigated against them.
