Fired DLA Piper Associate to Get Pregnancy, Leave Bias Trial (1)

DLA Piper LLP must face trial on a former attorney’s claim that bias caused the termination of her contract after she submitted a maternity leave request, a Manhattan federal judge ruled.

There’s competing evidence on whether intellectual property senior associate Anisha Mehta was let go because she was more than six months pregnant and seeking paid leave or because she was a poor performer, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York said Monday. The roughly two-month temporal proximity between Mehta’s announcement of her pregnancy and when she was fired established prima facie pregnancy bias, the court ...