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by Marjolijn Bijlefeld
For
Virginia Business
December,
2003
Harris
D. Butler III had no idea that a job painting houses
would lead to a career as an employment lawyer. Before
he graduated from University of Houston’s law school
in 1981, Butler painted houses part-time. He started
talking with a homeowner who learned Butler was going
to law school. “He convinced me that I should be
working for him in trial advocacy. I clerked for him
and worked for him when I finished school,” Butler
recalls. His mentor’s specialty? Public employment,
particularly cases involving school teachers.
Harris D. Butler III |
Butler,
47, migrated east to Virginia after his marriage. He
met his future wife, a University of Virginia law student,
in Houston while she was doing a summer clerkship. They
married the following summer. At the end of her clerkship,
“she asked if I was interested in coming east.”
The couple came to Richmond in 1986, and Butler worked
at a couple of law firms developing a plaintiff’s
employment practice before joining his current firm,
which has evolved over the years to Butler, Williams
and Skilling.
Today,
Butler’s firm does occasional management work,
helping employers cultivate a better work environment.
“I’m a business owner. I know that following
the laws and being proactive in creating good morale
and treating employees equitably and fairly is good
business,” he says. Mostly, however, he handles
plaintiff’s cases in employment disputes, although
some issues, such as severance packages and noncompete
clauses, can be either management or employee issues.
This year, his firm represented several dozen former
Capital One employees who claimed age discrimination
as a factor in their firing. The case, which drew the
involvement of the AARP, was settled under confidential
terms in June.
Employment
law is challenging because people’s emotions run
high and perceptions are often wrong, says Butler. “Perhaps
because of advertising by personal injury lawyers, some
people have this mentality that if they’ve been
fired, it’s like hitting the lottery. I need to
tell them that generally, employers have wide latitude
about why they can discharge their employees.”
Butler
and his colleagues spend hours reviewing whether they
will even take on a case. “Our job is to see whether
they have claims under recognized law. Our appellate
court is one of the most conservative in the country.
These are hard cases and employees have very few protections.”
The firm takes on only a limited number of cases —
“ones where we feel we can make a difference for
the client.”
Age
discrimination is one area in the spotlight now because
of corporate layoffs. Many times, employers seeking
the greatest impact on the bottom line might try to
terminate some of their higher-wage employees —
who often are older employees. “In all reduction
of force cases, we’re not challenging the right
of the employer to reduce the force, but whether age
was a factor in making that decision,” says Butler.
Forced
rankings are another hot area in employment law. The
idea is that by continually weeding out the bottom-performing
employees, a business can improve its work force. “If
you have a diverse bell curve work force, that’s
great. But if you have a highly qualified, all-star
team and you’ve only gone after the best prospect,
putting the template on top of that would be very difficult.”
Historically,
Butler has taken on individual plaintiff’s cases.
“Now more and more, we’re doing multi-plaintiff
and class cases,” he says. Employment cases typically
boil down to performance issues. With only one plaintiff,
it is very difficult to get to the bottom of what happened.
“But if a company has 200 employees — all
of whom may have been well evaluated — and needs
to get rid of 50 of them,” it can be easier to
connect the dots on what factors carried weight.
Butler laughs when he thinks how differently things
might have turned out if his wife had asked him to move
to California, for example. “That’s
a haven for people who do what I do.” But Texas,
where he cut his teeth, and Virginia have similar pro-business
environments. “We feel that if we take the time
and work hard, we’ll succeed. We simply need to
outwork, outsmart and outthink the other side.”
Return
to Virginia Business - December 2003
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