SAMANTHA GRANT
REED SMITH LLP, Partner
Samantha Grant, a partner with both the Century City and downtown offices of Reed Smith, is considered a strategic and pragmatic attorney in her labor and employment practice.
Having joined Reed Smith last year, Grant counts a two-year secondment — working both with her prior firm and also with another business — as in-house counsel with a Fortune 50 company as an important step in her career. Outside of her firm work, Grant is also involved with a variety of professional organizations, including the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, the N-Gen Advisory Board and the American Bar Association.
How did you discover your interest in law? And how did you arrive at your specialty?
While I attended the University of Toronto, I did internships with government agencies, and my first internship was with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a federal agency that works to investigate and resolve discrimination complaints. As the intake officer for the Ontario region, my job was to evaluate these complaints to determine whether they fell within the ambit of the Canadian Human Rights Act and, where appropriate, to try to negotiate early resolutions with employers, employees and sometimes unions. I found the work and the cases to be very interesting, and when I applied to law school I knew that I wanted to be a labor and employment attorney.
Tell us about the most noteworthy or interesting case (or cases) that you’ve been involved with.
Years ago, I worked on the Lyle v. Warner Brothers Television case, which went to the California Supreme Court and generated widespread attention with several amicus curiae briefs filed on both sides of the case. The plaintiff, a writers’ assistant on the TV show “Friends,” filed a complaint that alleged that listening to the sexual banter in the writers’ room constituted sexual harassment. Because we filed a summary judgment motion, the Supreme Court had to accept as true the…
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