The plaintiffs in a pair of long-running, consolidated discrimination lawsuits against one of the nation’s largest for-profit education companies filed additional charges in federal district court on Feb. 3. The new charges followed a notice to the court that Michael Scott’s and LaMont Jones, Jr.’s contentious and long-running cases against the embattled Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corporation were not successfully mediated by the end of January.
Washington, D.C., civil rights attorney Amos Jones leads the team representing the plaintiffs.
According to the plaintiffs’ newly amended complaint, a court-stamped copy of which was obtained by Diverse shortly after it was filed in the U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, EDMC committed breach of contract, wrongful termination, common-law fraud, fraudulent inducement and outrageous conduct.
“Apparently, EDMC is in love with prolonged litigation,” said Amos Jones, the law professor and Washington, D.C. civil rights attorney who leads the team representing the plaintiffs and who filed the amended complaint as co-counsel with Pittsburgh class-action attorneys Aaron Rihn and Mark Troyan. “As reported in court in early February, yet another round of mediation did not yield a resolution, despite our best efforts.”
The race-discrimination, age-discrimination, and retaliation cases of Scott and Jones — former Art Institute of Pittsburgh admissions counselors — date to August 2012, when they filed separate charges at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Pittsburgh after Jones alleged having reported racial disparities in scholarship awards. Their respective federal judges in the U.S. District Court of Western Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh barred them from having their subsequent lawsuits heard in early 2015, but in October 2016 a federal appellate panel in Philadelphia unanimously reinstated their cases in a manner that gave rise to a consolidated case with class-action implications.
EDMC alleged that Scott and Jones were terminated for poor job performance, but their lawyers added that the men submitted evidence to the EEOC and the courts that their work and other job contributions at AIP were exemplary. AIP, which has faced shrinking enrollment and staff cuts in recent years, is one of many for-profit colleges across the nation owned by EDMC.
EDMC’s lead counsel, Casey Ryan of Reed Smith LLP in Pittsburgh, did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs claim that the delay caused by the ADR agreement superimposed during the pre-lawsuit federal civil-rights investigations stymied their opportunity to bring the new charges back in 2014, when the men filed suit. The amended complaint refers to documents showing that both men were top company performers who had received national recognition by their supervisors until the month they filed the EEOC complaints.
The men blame an EDMC corporate counsel, Karen Baillie, naming her in the amended lawsuit. “Plaintiffs, through counsel, hours after the policy first appeared, advised Defendant of the illegality of the superimposition of this policy, in writing to EDMC in-house Counsel Karen Baillie, asking her to withdraw the policy and eventually warning her, through a copiously cited legal notice, of the implications on her company of her failure to do so,” the First Amended Complaint alleges. “Baillie was unrelenting and refused to withdraw the fake ADR policy. On January 24, 2013, after refusing to sign the policy and receiving two additional retaliatory negative quarterly job-performance evaluations that same day and in October 2012, Jones’s employment was terminated. … Plaintiff Scott, in the first week of April 2013, suffered the same fate: termination ….”
Ballie, now a partner in the Pittsburgh office of Schnader Harrison Segal and Lewis, did not return a telephone call seeking comment
Amos Jones told Diverse he is in it for the long-haul. “Now we have, from the bench in open court on January 5, a serious question expressly about one of their former lawyers’ malpractice insurance because that attorney is to testify about her conduct of the rollout of the fake ADR policy in October 2012.”
Jamal Eric Watson can be reached at jwatson1@diverseeducation.com. You can follow him on twitter @jamalericwatson
