Anderson Kill PC has brought back on Tuesday its former employment group co-chair as of counsel a decade after she left the firm, bolstering its suite of services at a time when the #MeToo movement has clients facing complex discrimination and harassment complaints.
Dona Kahn returned to her firm of 18 years on Tuesday after a few years with another firm and several more spent in solo practice helping businesses mediate and investigate complaints. In her second stint at the firm, Kahn will be a neutral investigator for businesses facing sex-related complaints, some of which may date back several years.
“Firms are going to start to say, 'Now it’s no longer feasible to just have our HR people do this. We need to get somebody outside … that’s not going to represent and defend us in a claim but going to be somebody who will investigate,'” Kahn told Law360. “There’s a lot of mines out there that are going to come up now, with these new allegations, old allegations, and I think that I’m somebody that could fill that need.”
Kahn is intimately familiar with sex-related workplace issues, having entered the legal industry in the 1960s, at a time when she says it had not fully accepted women. She later spent more than 40 years handling employment matters for the federal government, employers and workers alike. She supervised a team of attorneys in the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Philadelphia office starting in 1973, shortly after Congress empowered the agency to bring suits alleging violations of federal anti-discrimination law. Three years later, Kahn opened her own firm, which mostly represented employers.
Anderson Kill acquired Kahn’s firm in 1990 and she remained there until 2008, spending some of that tenure as the firm’s administrator and co-chair of its Employment and Labor Law Group. Now back at Anderson Kill, Kahn brings an expertise that will help clients navigate waters churned by new awareness of workplace sexual harassment.
“We are delighted to welcome Dona back to the Anderson Kill family,” firm managing shareholder Robert M. Horkovich said in a statement. “Her deep experience in investigating workplace harassment and discrimination claims is especially timely as a new wave of awareness and allegations of harassment impact the workplace.”
Kahn said she’s as glad to be back as the firm is to have her.
“I really enjoyed my time with Anderson Kill, and obviously we got along pretty well because they asked me back now, and I’m delighted,” she said. “I’m really excited about it.”
Kahn earned her juris doctor at the Rutgers University School of Law and her Bachelor of Arts from Brandeis University. She began her career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and briefly worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before joining the EEOC.