For Women Who Refuse to Be Underestimated, Underpaid and Undervalued

When Jay-Z hired me as in-house counsel at Roc Nation, he joked, “Great, now who’s going to draft your agreement?”
“I’m more concerned with who’s going to review mine,” I said.
“You would hire an attorney even though you are one?”

Absolutely. Any lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client. You do not hire a lawyer only to change the contract. You hire one to understand what the company refuses to change. While how they pay you – or not pay you – speaks volumes, those little provisions hidden in the back are some serious red flags on how they will treat you in the future.   This week’s guest on Takin’ Care of Lady Business, Gretchen Carlson, found one of those provisions buried on page eleven of her Fox News contract. It nearly kept her out of court. Then she helped change federal law because of it.

With Love & Lady Business,
JJ 

In today’s edition:
1. The Clause Buried in Her Contract Almost Silenced Her with Gretchen Carlson
2. You Negotiated the Wrong Thing
3. TJD Power List
4. Lady Bits

1. The Clause Buried in Her Contract Almost Silenced Her with Gretchen Carlson

That is what Gretchen Carlson's own lawyers told her when she came to them ready to file. Gretchen is an award-winning journalist, a New York Times bestselling author, and the co-founder of Lift Our Voices, the organization she built to end the legal mechanisms that keep workers quiet. She spent years preparing before she sued Roger Ailes. And then she found out the contract she had signed years earlier could have buried the entire case. Her lawyers had to engineer a workaround just to bring it forward at all.

What she did next is why I wanted her on this show. She did not just win her own case. She went after the machinery. She helped pass two federal laws, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act and the Speak Out Act, both signed in 2022. Then she built a free AI tool through Lift Our Voices so any worker can read their own contract and spot these clauses before they sign anything.

In this episode you will learn:
— How to spot the moment a contract quietly strips your leverage, before you sign it
 — The real difference between forced arbitration and an NDA, and why confusing them costs you
 — What actually changed for American workers after her lawsuit, and what did not
 — Why rewriting the law turned out to be easier than changing the culture around it

🎧 Listen to the full episode here: Spotify | Apple | YouTube
Explore Lift Our Voices

2. You Negotiated the Wrong Thing

Every woman I have ever represented came to me focused on the number. Salary, equity, title, bonus structure. She had comps. She had a floor. She was ready. Not one of them ever asked me about the dispute resolution section. That is the part that decides what happens to you when something goes wrong. And it is almost always sitting in the back half of the document, in a paragraph nobody reads, written by lawyers who were paid to protect the company and not you.

Here is what the research actually shows. Employees who go to federal court win 36.4% of the time, with an average award of $336,291. Employees forced into arbitration win 18.9% of the time, with an average award of $21,871. Same claims. Same facts. Roughly half the odds and a fraction of the money, decided entirely by a clause you signed before your first day.

You did not lose that case in arbitration. You lost it at signing.

So before you sign the next one, do these three things.

1. Find the dispute resolution clause and read it out loud. If it says arbitration, you are agreeing that no judge, no jury, and no public record will ever touch your claim. Ask whether it is mutual, whether the company picks the arbitrator, and who pays the fees.

2. Separate the NDA from the arbitration clause in your head. They are not the same thing. An NDA controls what you can say. Arbitration controls where you can say it and who decides. A contract can quietly do both, and most people only notice the one labeled confidentiality.

3. Negotiate the clause the same way you negotiate the number. Every term in an employment agreement is a term. Carve-outs get made all the time for people who ask. The reason you have never seen one negotiated is not that it is impossible. It is that almost nobody asks.

Do not do this alone. Hire an attorney, or upload it to LOV Where You Work, the free contract tool from Lift Our Voices, and let it flag what you are signing. The number determines what you earn. The clause determines whether you have any recourse at all. One of those is reversible.

REAL TALK
You are not bad at negotiating. You were taught to negotiate the part they were willing to discuss. Read the back of the contract before you sign the front of it.
If you want someone to actually read your agreement before you sign it, that is what we do.

3. TJD Power List: Cate Luzio

Cate Luzio was told to raise money. She wrote the checks herself instead.

Founder and CEO of Luminary. Former Global Head of Multinational Corporate Banking at HSBC. She left banking in 2018 and self-funded the whole thing, against nearly everyone's advice. It is now a multimillion-dollar global business with 15,000 members.

Her guiding line came from Diane von Furstenberg: keep your business yours for as long as you possibly can. Ownership is not a feeling. It is a set of terms, and every one of them is either yours or somebody else's.

Find Cate at weareluminary.com

💋💋 Lady Bits

💸 Women hit record workforce gains this year. The pay gap grew to $671 billion anyway.

🏀 The number one draft pick just did something no rookie has ever done at the WNBA All-Star.

💍 The newest addition to prenups to even the playing field.

⚽ This is what leverage looks like.

Hi, I’m JJ

Since starting the Justice Dept, we have increased women's wealth by over $100MM in just over 5 years. Want to know what inspires me to do this work, other than making women money? My clients' surprised reaction when we manage to get them much better terms for themselves and their companies, whether via talent agreements, employment, severance, partnerships, asset sales or investments. They often admit that they never thought they could get that result. Not even hoped. This blows my mind. As we know at The Justice Dept. you are all worth everything you ask for and more. Reach out and we’ll show you how!
x TJD