The Maestro

Employment lawyer Paula Barran had just printed two copies of a commencement address given by President Lyndon Johnson at Howard University following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—the one where he said freedom was not enough to “wipe away the scars of centuries.” This was two months into the second Trump administration, so two months since President Trump issued an executive order designed to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government and private sector. 

“Insane is probably too non-descriptive a word,” Barran says about last January. “Once those executive orders get signed, people are supposed to comply with them. Then they call their lawyers and say ‘What does it mean?’ ‘OK, which one are you talking about?’ Because there were what—100? We got so many on a single day and it didn’t stop there. It’s just been persistent.”

A few years ago, Barran, wary of the way some DEI programs were being rolled out, took a certificate course at Cornell to be grounded in the theory behind it. “There is a lot that is foundational to diversity programs that is good and valuable—and, I think, necessary—and we didn’t have to make it illegal,” she says.

Thus the LBJ speech: to help craft training programs to protect clients while moving the ball forward. As for the second copy? That was to hand to a colleague—something Barran does often.

“Her love for the law is oozing out of her pores,” says Shayda Le, a partner at Barran Liebman, whom Barran hired 10 years ago. “She approaches situations with a genuine sense of curiosity and learning. It’s not like clients pay her to do legal research at her rate. She’s doing that because she believes that’s how you become and maintain being the best lawyer you can be.”

During Barran’s 45-year career, she has handled more than 300 cases, including major labor arbitrations and high-profile employment litigation, arguing on behalf of institutions as large as the University of Oregon before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“She’s truly an expert at both the ins and outs of labor law and the ins and outs of trial work on employment cases,” says Ed Harnden, who co-founded Barran Liebman with Barran. “She’s not pounding the table to try to get her way; she uses her intellect. She deals with people in a calm, straightforward, honest way that makes them feel good about what they’re doing. If you sit in her office and listen to her, you just feel the enthusiasm for the law.”

Barran has always valued education. An Ohio native, she was both itinerant in what she learned and where she learned it, earning a bachelor’s from William & Mary in Virginia, a master’s at Cornell in New York, and a Ph.D. in 13th century German literature at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. 

She calls her time at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto magical. “I don’t think I ever wanted something quite so much as to be a lawyer,” she says.

After a clerkship in Toronto, Barran looked for a position in labor law in Portland. “I had spent a summer here when I was in graduate school and always had this idea that I would move to Oregon,” she says. “Portland seemed to be an absolutely perfect city to me—and still is, after all these years.”

In 1980, she landed at Spears Lubersky. Harnden recalls how Barran quickly made a name for herself—so much so that, at the start of her second year, he asked her to take over an oral argument before the Ninth Circuit when their appellate lawyer became sick.

“In one day, she got ready for the oral argument in a very complicated discrimination case—and won,” he says. “She handled every question the judges had for her, which were many, and did a better job than any of the appellate lawyers we had. … You would never have guessed, if you sat in that room, that it was her first argument—or even her 10th or 15th. She moved right through it calmly and assuredly. I was amazed.”

Within five years, Barran made partner. It broke the firm’s glass ceiling and a celebration ensued. “I couldn’t get into my office,” Barran remembers. “They had crammed it full of balloons, and right at the very top, floating out of the office, was one that said: You’re Number 1. It was a sit-down-and-weep moment.”

In 1998, seven partners in the management-side employment group, including Barran and husband Richard Hunt, spun off to form Barran Liebman.

“She tried vehemently not to have her name in the name of the partnership because some of us were more senior,” Harnden says. “We said a good portion of our clientele are human resources directors at large companies, and I don’t know of any other firm name that starts with a female.”

Innovations came fast: client e-alerts on new legislation; an annual seminar bringing together 700 clients; a “train-the-trainer” project with hands-on instruction for corporate leaders and heads of HR. All were about educating clients on how to stay out of trouble.

“Lawyers, myself included sometimes, tend to look at it as: Once a lawsuit is filed, then we get in and defend them,” Harnden says. Paula’s leadership, he adds, was proactive—about getting them educated.

He recalls a small-business client with problems. Barran quickly resolved a lawsuit they faced and then told Harnden she was spending half a day training the owner and employees pro bono. “It was a mom-and-pop operation and she moved them into a situation where instead of having numerous claims, they were smoothly running,” he says. “They did not have a need for us for over five years.”

Barran describes her practice as mostly compliance. “I litigate, too, from time to time,” she says. 

The lawsuit she loves to talk about is Kennewick Man—a 10-year battle over a 9,000-year-old skeleton that three students stumbled upon in the Columbia River in 1996.

At the time, she didn’t know anything about the conflict between scientists, who wanted to study one of the oldest and most complete skeletons found in North America, and the tribes that sought the return of the remains under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. But a business lawyer called and asked if she’d like to sue the federal government on behalf of eight anthropologists opposing repatriation efforts and seeking study rights.

She won at trial and before the Ninth Circuit, and was called to testify before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. She also joined one of the study sessions before Kennewick Man’s remains were returned to five tribes and buried in a private ceremony in 2017. “For somebody who’s a little bit of a higher education geek, it was awfully gratifying,” she says. “I was crawling around on the floor with all these scientists. ‘What are you guys looking at now?’ The level of information I got in that couple of hours was fascinating.”

All of which fits with how Barran describes the evolution of her practice: a succession of temporary areas of expertise.

The first such area, back in the 1980s, was employee drug testing.

In the midst of reading everything she could about corporate substance abuse policies, she got a call from a K-12 school that wanted to give students drug tests. That took her down a Tinker v. Des Moines rabbit hole on how a school could drug-test and still ensure students did not “shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.”

The school wanted to implement drug testing for students in all extracurricular activities, but Barran advised limiting it to sports and not to test groups like the drama club. The school listened. “And darned if they didn’t get sued, and darned if they didn’t win because they had followed that little piece of advice,” she says.

A less temporary area of expertise was maternity leave. “I feel like I spent a third of my life trying to figure out how to prepare maternity leave policies that were fair,” she says—including one at her own firm. (See sidebar.) “That was a huge issue in employment. It made for a very difficult situation: trying to figure out how you were going to take somebody who had this long absence but still make them whole for compensation. I suggest that we still don’t know how to do that, but as a society we’ve been working on it.”

During the Obama years, her practice became focused on education and Title IX. Before this, she’d represented colleges and universities in labor and employment work, but as enforcement of gender discrimination on campuses shot up, she got a call from one client asking for a referral. What expert could train them on Title IX? Barran couldn’t find anyone. So she volunteered.

She attended a training seminar in Las Vegas and studied John Doe cases brought by male students around the country on due process and being wrongly branded as rapists. “I would read the cases and reverse engineer: If I could change one thing in this case, what would it have been to make it fair?” she says. “If you read them from that perspective, that this case caused this catastrophic lawsuit, and if you had only done this—if you had only let the accused see the evidence before the hearing, then things would have come out differently—you could learn so much about how to make the process better.”

There was a lot of blaming of colleges at the time. “Everybody expects higher ed administrators to be perfect, and I didn’t see a lot of perfection, but I wish I could bottle up their effort and their passion for their jobs,” she says. “As often happens when civil rights laws get enforced, we see a pendulum swing: There’s a need for something, a law gets passed, and there will frequently be a lot of overcorrection; and then the pendulum swings back to an ‘angle of repose.’” At which point, citing Wallace Stegner’s 1971 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, she explains that the term comes from mining.

The next big pendulum swing was pay equity. Since Oregon’s Equal Pay Act was enacted in 2017, Barran has defended universities in major cases brought by professors. She argues the law’s language of “work of comparable character” is a complex concept at research institutions where faculty job descriptions sound the same but vary vastly. “It’s part of the frustration but also the intense intellectual stimulation of doing this kind of compliance work,” she says.

Harnden says what’s noteworthy is the lack of pay-equity cases against Barran’s university clients in recent years—including a four-year period with zero litigation. She was able to get them to a point, he says, “where they had a clear understanding not only of what the law required but how to stay out of difficulty.”

Shayda Le says Barran’s intellect—able to craft the first novel arguments in response to changing law—is one reason she’s a standout. Another is her relationship with clients.

“She is never too important to be in the trenches with them,” Le says. “She comes to her interactions with people with an absolutely non-inflated sense of self. She does not act like she’s the most important person in the room, even when she is. She doesn’t suck up the oxygen. … That’s driven from her need to be a good partner to you in this legal endeavor we’re undertaking. She truly defines herself as an attorney. That is her calling.” 

Indeed, when Le asked Barran if she ever wanted to retire, Barran genuinely wondered what she could possibly do that would be more fun. 

“I’ve made friends with some of the most amazing people,” Barran says. “I got to meet the most celebrated Smithsonian scientist that ever existed. I got to call my mother standing outside Hillary Clinton’s Senate office saying I’m going to testify tomorrow.

“I promised my colleagues that I’m going to be awfully hard to get rid of.”