HIV-Positive Lawyer Accuses His Firm of Bias

Among the 32,000 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, among the testimonials to fallen friends and colleagues, one panel attests to the heartache of a San Francisco law firm.

With this 3-by-6-foot rectangle, the firm of Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe remembers two dozen staffers who have died of AIDS.

It is also, say members of the firm, a mark of Heller, Ehrman’s AIDS consciousness. For years, it has fought AIDS discrimination and organized AIDS workshops for its more than 200 employees in San Francisco--long an epicenter of the disease.

But don’t tell Andrew Mead that Heller, Ehrman is some sort of paragon.

Mead says he is trapped in a real-life version of the movie “Philadelphia”; his high-powered career at Heller, Ehrman withered, he says, when he told his bosses that he was HIV positive. And now he has filed a million-dollar discrimination suit.

The firm’s chairman, Robert Rosenfeld, is outraged: “One claim calls into question everything you’ve done for years and years and years.”

Mead, 38, acknowledges that Heller, Ehrman’s reputation is such that his suit has come as a surprise to many. “I’m hearing a lot of shock [and] outrage, verging on disbelief,” he says.

It was that reputation that drew Mead to Heller, Ehrman from the first.

Mead grew up in Nashville and, after his father died, put himself through college and Harvard Law School. He skipped graduation in 1983 to take the first phase of the California bar exam and started working immediately for Heller, Ehrman.

As his career progressed, he averaged more than 2,000 billable hours of work a year. He was doing corporate law, apparently headed for a partnership, and making six figures.

Then, in late 1991, he revealed his illness.

Mead claims that his superiors took him off two major cases and declined to assign more, despite repeated requests for work. His billable hours dropped to double digits.

“[They] basically marooned me, transferring me first from one person to another, from one department to another, and finally sticking me in the administrative department with very little to do but make-work,” he says.

Although he has shown few physical signs of AIDS, even today, Mead claims that his bosses feared the image of a lawyer with “hair falling out or skin lesions.”

“With big firms, there’s always a lot of competition for the best clients. And any little thing that can present even a cosmetic variation in your presentation to clients strikes fear in them,” Mead says. “They go to great lengths to cultivate images.”

Beginning in 1992, he began collecting memos, handwritten notes and phone messages. Much of it, he says, will prove his claims that a new attorney was hired to pick up his clients, that junior associates assigned to him to help with the “grunt work” were taken away and that he was relieved of his duties on the firm’s committees handling sexual harassment and recruiting.

Despite bouts of fatigue, Mead didn’t want to retire. He says he told his bosses that he still wanted to be considered for partner status. But, if that wasn’t possible, he wanted to cut back on his frequent travel to Los Angeles and New York.

Finally, in 1994, a frustrated Mead took disability leave, ending his 11-year career with the firm.

“The law was my life,” he says. “It was who I was. It gave me purpose.”

Although they decline to discuss the specifics of the case, top officials at Heller, Ehrman say there’s another side to the story.

“I think we treated him fairly generously,” says Rosenfeld, who is livid that Mead has aired his case in the San Francisco media. “If there’s a dispute, that’s what courts are for--not newspapers.”

In particular, Mead’s unflinching comparison of his case to “Philadelphia”--the story of an AIDS-afflicted attorney’s battle with his malevolent law firm--causes Rosenfeld to pound his fist on the table: “It’s an affront and an insult to all of us. He knows that’s not true.”

Of the more than 20 people with AIDS who have left Heller, Ehrman on long-term disability, only one other person has had a dispute with the firm. And that dispute was resolved internally, says Norman Aguon, an automation systems trainer and member of the Heller, Ehrman Lesbian and Gay Alliance.

Aguon, who was a friend of Mead, says he is reserving judgment on the discrimination case.

“I don’t know if it happened,” he says. “But I’d be very surprised.”

Surprise, in fact, seems to be the overriding sentiment among Heller, Ehrman employees, past and present. While praising Mead, many speak highly of the firm. Kevin Fox, a former data processor with the firm who has AIDS, called the firm’s treatment of sick employees “very, very good.”

“I got a full workload until the day I left,” says Fox, who retired at his bosses’ urging in 1992 after nine years at Heller, Ehrman.

Several others in his department had died of AIDS, he says.

“[My bosses] were concerned that they had worked themselves to death and didn’t want me to do the same,” he says. “They were real gems about the whole thing.”

Mead, meanwhile, is energized by his lawsuit; he has added 30 pounds to his 5-foot-6 frame in hopes of staying healthy. In addition to $1 million in wages, he seeks an unspecified amount for emotional distress.

“Maybe this kind of thing won’t happen as much in the future if people realize that they’re not going to escape unchallenged every time,” he says.

He has some regrets. He is sorry that he sometimes put his career ahead of his relationship with Anthony Stone, a nurse who was his partner for 11 years. Stone died of AIDS complications in early 1995.

He often thinks about the canceled dinners and postponed vacations.

“I feel like I took away a part of his life and his opportunity to enjoy his life with me because of my work--and then the work amounted to nothing,” Mead says.

As for “Philadelphia,” Mead says, it was well over a year before he could bring himself to go to a theater. And then he went alone.

“I finally saw it late at night in an obscure theater, sitting in the back row with my head against the wall, pretty much crying to myself throughout the entire screening,” he says. “I’ve never been able to watch it again.”