00-2839 McCaskill v. SCI Management Corp., et al.

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“The right to attorney’s fees therefore is integral to the purposes of the statute and often is central to the ability of persons to seek redress from violations of Title VII. In recognition of the importance of the attorney’s fees provisions to the remedial and deterrent effect of Title VII, counsel for SCI conceded at oral argument that if we construe the arbitration agreement as not allowing the arbitrator to award attorney’s fees, then the agreement deprives the plaintiff of remedies under Title VII and is unenforceable.”

“The attorney’s fees provision in the arbitration agreement quite plainly does just that. It mandates that each party shall pay its own attorney’s fees regardless of the outcome of the arbitration. SCI attempts to avoid that plain language with a novel interpretation. According to SCI, the provision regulates only what McCaskill is responsible for paying, not what she may be awarded, and thus it is possible for an arbitrator to award her attorneys’ fees consistent with the arbitration agreement, as long as she uses that award to pay her attorneys. That defies the plain meaning of the words. SCI has identified no other context in which a court would hold that a provision requiring a person to pay her own attorney’s fees actually means the opposing party may be required to pay the fees to her, and then she must pay her own attorney. The provision obviously means that neither party can be required to pay the attorney’s fees of the other party, either directly or through the straw-man approach advocated by SCI.”

Reversed and remanded.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Conlon, J., Rovner, J.