Linda E. Shostak has focused her practice on the litigation of and trials of numerous employment law matters, representing public and private sector clients and, on a limited basis, individual plaintiffs. She has tried a variety of discrimination claims, including national origin discrimination, sexual harassment, failure to hire/promote, and wrongful termination in violation of public policy. Ms. Shostak also has substantial experience both in class actions and the defense of BPC §17,200 claims. In more than 30 years in litigation and trial work, she has also handled a variety of cases involving commercial disputes, libel, and criminal cases.

Ms. Shostak has lectured extensively and has taught at the advanced program of trial advocacy of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy, spoken on panels for the Libel Defense Research Counsel, and has been a frequent lecturer for CEB and the Rutter Group. She is a former chair of the San Francisco Bar Association's Litigation Section, and has been profiled in American Lawyer and Forbes.

Ms. Shostak associated with Morrison & Foerster in 1974 and became a partner in 1979.

• Lemke v. BCI Coca-Cola
  In December, we successfully defended our client, BCI, the Northern California division of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, against a wrongful termination/disability discrimination case brought in Alameda Superior Court. The plaintiff, who has leukemia, had been accommodated in the workplace since 1999 with light duty jobs. In 2002, the plaintiff was terminated from his employment for theft when a tape, taken in a surveillance sting at his workplace, purportedly showed him stealing product. The plaintiff denied taking any product and was reinstated after winning a union arbitration. Therefore, in the trial, the plaintiff claimed severe emotional distress resulting from the termination ( he was out from work for nearly a year) as well as punitive damages. Despite these facts and in the face of an eve of trial demand of two million dollars, the plaintiff succeeded in only one of his six claims, recovering just $100,000. No punitive damages were awarded.
• Singleton v. Regents of the University of California
  We represented Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in an equal pay class action involving approximately 3,000 potential class members, with claims being asserted under the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), California Equal Pay Act, and California Unfair Competition Law. In addition to the civil action, there was an added level of complexity as a result of an ongoing class-level investigation being done by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing concerning allegations of racial discrimination, and an ongoing investigation by the Government Accounting Office. We were able to obtain summary judgment against the lead plaintiff, cause the plaintiffs to abandon their class equal pay claims, and reduce Lawrence Livermore’s exposure to liability on the remaining claims by persuading the trial judge to narrow the scope of class certification and to create subclasses, for most of which plaintiffs were unable to obtain representative plaintiffs. Lawrence Livermore eventually agreed to settle the case. While the plaintiffs originally projected $500 million in damages, Lawrence Livermore paid only $17.5 million (including attorneys' fees).
• Californians for Disability Rights v. Mervyn's California, Inc.
  In a six week trial, we successfully represented Mervyn's Department Stores in a case brought by Disability Rights Advocates under Business & Professions Code 17200 challenging as a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the spacing standards employed by Mervyns' as to the distance between the racks on which merchandise is displayed. In his ruling, Judge Henry Needham of the Alameda Superior Court found that while the merchandise on Mervyn's display pads was not wholly accessible, Mervyn's level of effort was all that could be readily achieved without doing damage to, and seriously altering, Mervyn's business. The Court found that to require further widening of the aisles would "be disastrous, resulting in lost sales to Mervyn's of tens of millions of dollars" and causing "a competitive disadvantage to Mervyn's."