Harold I. Goodman leads the employment law practice at Raynes McCarty. He has been called "Pennsylvania's top lawyer" for his work representing victims of employment discrimination. Under his leadership, the firm has achieved precedent-setting successes on behalf of our clients in cases of wrongful discharge and discrimination because of sex, race, age, or disability status. Mr. Goodman has represented his clients four times before the United States Supreme Court and won all four times.
We start by guiding clients through the maze of state and federal employment law that governs workers' rights. If we find that those rights have been violated, we then help the workers take their cases to court. We have represented individual clients and been lead counsel in class actions, including:
- A class action race discrimination case that opened up heavy equipment jobs in eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware to minorities
- An historic class action that ended racial discrimination by the Pennsylvania State Police
- An age discrimination suit that resulted in a multimillion dollar verdict on behalf of an employee of an Allentown, Pennsylvania, chemical and gas company
- A class action lawsuit that required Pennsylvania to provide due process hearings for workers' compensation recipients
- A sex discrimination suit against CBS on behalf of a well-known television news anchor
- A class action lawsuit protecting the pension rights of telephone employees
- A disability discrimination lawsuit on behalf of heart attack victims who were unlawfully discharged from their jobs
In addition to these cases, in 2002 Mr. Goodman won a unanimous decision in the United States Supreme Court, which held that employment discrimination complaints need not be fact-specific, but only need to put employers on general notice of the plaintiff's claims. The Court held that the rest of the argument is for discovery and trial. In 2004, Mr. Goodman won a case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which held that a successor employer could be held responsible for the discrimination practiced by the company it bought.