Employment law keeps working well for Piefer

Listen to this article

A close friend recently told Sally Piefer that her college-age daughter had inclinations toward law school, but wasn’t applying because she wants a family.

“She was afraid she might find herself employed in a company or firm that isn’t very flexible,” Piefer said. “But I told her it can be done. It’s a fear a lot of women have, if they want a career and to be a wife and mother, and how to find time for it all.”

Piefer knows it’s possible because she’s done it.

Before law school, Piefer worked as a legal secretary/paralegal in Chicago at an intellectual property firm, and then the corporate counsel’s office of Budget-Rent-a-Car. In that latter capacity, she especially enjoyed employment law matters.

Not surprisingly, she found her law school employment law courses fascinating.

“Naively, I thought that by working in that area of law, I’d never be in court,” she said — although these days, as a shareholder with The Schroeder Group SC Attorneys at Law in Waukesha, she’s frequently in court and feels very comfortable there.

In Heath v. Varity, Piefer helped put together the summary judgment materials and draft the appellate brief in an age-discrimination case where her client, Heath, was part of a large group of downsized employees from a former Massey-Ferguson plant. The timing of Heath’s termination left him ineligible for enhanced pension benefits. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and the case settled in his favor.

About a year later, Piefer defended Federal Express before the Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission in a case where plaintiff Stroede alleged discrimination on the basis of his arrest and conviction record. Because he’d entered into a deferred prosecution agreement, he wasn’t convicted and Fed Ex could not rely on that to dismiss him, he argued. Piefer’s prevailing argument, however, was that the underlying conduct, indecent exposure while on the clock and within close proximity of a parked FedEx truck, was just cause for his termination. LIRC, and later a Dane County Circuit Court, agreed.

To read all of the Women in the Law profiles, click here