The Woman Who Plans to Make Elon Pay for His Twitter Sins
Earlier this year, as Elon Musk looked increasingly likely to lose his court battle and be forced into purchasing Twitter, Justine De Caires started to get nervous.
Like others, De Caires, a Twitter software engineer of three and a half years, predicted a Musk takeover would come with mass layoffs. Unlike many, the 25-year-old had closely followed the legal battle between the billionaire and the social media company and read every page of the merger agreement. “I get fascinated and interested in things very easily,” explained DeCaires, who uses they/them pronouns.
Twitter higher-ups promised to stick to a generous severance package in the event of a Musk takeover, De Caires says. But the engineer had doubts, and started looking for labor rights attorneys with a history of dealing with powerful tech companies. The first email was to a Massachusetts attorney named Shannon Liss-Riordan, who had filed a lawsuit against Tesla months earlier. The attorney called back that same day.
“It was kind of like, ‘OK, let’s wait and see how this goes,’” De Caires recalled of that first conversation. “But when things started happening—oh, she was ready.”
The mass layoffs at Twitter in November—a proverbial Red Wedding that cut the staff in half—has proven fertile ground for lawsuits. But Liss-Riordan, a labor rights veteran once dubbed “Sledgehammer Shannon,” was perhaps the best-equipped attorney in the country to handle the case. A chatty 53-year-old Boston transplant, Liss-Riordan has sued tech companies from Uber to DoorDash and won judgments of up to $100 million on behalf of their workers.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/shannon-liss-riordan-plans-to-make-elon-musk-pay-for-his-twitter-sins?ref=home
It's clobberin' time! Go Sledgehammer Shannon!
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