In her first job after law school, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft
worked for a small firm and did a little bit of everything,
from writing up wills and closing real estate deals to
sorting out contract issues and handling lawsuits. So
when she started a firm in 1990, she planned to offer
essentially the same range of services.
But then a colleague referred a discrimination case
to her. The plaintiff, a woman who had worked in planning
at the Loudoun County Department of Housing, claimed
to have been verbally and sexually harassed by her supervisor
and then terminated without cause. Bredehoft took the
case to trial and won a verdict of $675,000.
The case made the front page
of The Washington Post, and "then the floodgates opened," she recalls. "Everybody
started referring employment cases to me, and I got so
much work in that area that I had to phase out all of
my miscellaneous work."
Today, Bredehoft is considered one of the country's
leading (and relatively few) plaintiff's lawyers specializing
in employment law, spending about half of her practice
representing victims of harassment, wrongful termination
and discrimination based on gender, race, age and disability.
She devotes the other half of her practice to high-level
executives. She advises them on severance agreements,
employment agreements and noncompete covenants. She also
represents them in stock option and valuation disputes
or in civil cases involving fraud, defamation or wrongful
termination charges.
When there's an employment dispute headed to court, Bredehoft
says with a laugh, "I only represent the good guys."
Juries would seem to agree with
her. For example, Bredehoft represented Keith Stiles,
a veteran Leesburg police chief who was fired after
blowing the whistle on two town officials for allegedly
using government credit cards for personal expenditures.
The jury awarded Stiles $3.1 million. "Elaine's
commitment to her cause is very intense," says Aubrey
Ford, a lawyer with the Richmond-based firm Cantor Arkema,
who has worked with Bredehoft on several large cases,
including the Stiles case. "She has boundless energy
and she is very, very determined to win the case on behalf
of her client."
Bredehoft's enthusiasm for her job comes naturally.
Her father, Curtis Charlson, was a trial lawyer in Minnesota,
and by the time Elaine was in the first grade she knew
she wanted to follow in his footsteps.
In elementary school, she petitioned
her principal for a second snow hill for third- and
fourth-graders after seeing them bullied by older students
on the existing hill. And when a music teacher changed
the words of "Jeremiah
the Bullfrog" to "Jeremiah the Prophet," Elaine
asked school administrators for an injunction, arguing
that the teacher's actions had violated the First Amendment
clause requiring a separation of church and state. "I
was a bit of a goofball back then," recalls Bredehoft.
She has two daughters, ages 16
and 17, and spends her off-time coaching sports and
taking flight lessons with her husband, Keenan Frank. "But
the truth was, I always liked standing up on behalf
of everybody else, and I was really eager to practice
law."
Her fortuitous stumble into employment law has enabled
her to play out her childhood passion on a large stage.
As a plaintiff's attorney, she believes she is not only
helping her client but also having a larger impact on
the workplace.
"Whenever I am successful
in litigating on behalf of a victim, whether it's for
gender discrimination or racial harassment or defamation,
I feel like corporations are going to see that and
think twice about how they treat their employees."
Ford calls Bredehoft a "successful
Don Quixote. She's tilting at windmills, but she's
actually winning cases and getting multimillion-dollar
verdicts."
