Legal experts are divided over whether universities are common targets in discrimination lawsuits.
In July, two former University employees - one of the Medical Center, the other of the Dental Care Network - filed lawsuits against Penn, citing discrimination and retaliation.
Alan Lerner, a professor who specializes in employment-discrimination law at Penn Law School, said he believes such lawsuits are likely to occur at universities because the schools are wealthy and can pay plaintiffs a significant sum if the suits are successful in court.
"From my experience, lawyers won't take the cases unless the cases have merit and unless the defendant has money," he said.
Lerner said the reason lawyers are choosy when it comes to representing such cases is that, most of the time, attorneys representing plaintiffs in discrimination lawsuits represent clients on a contingency basis and get paid only if the client wins or if the two parties settle.
Sidney Gold, an employment lawyer and co-chairman of the labor and employment committee for the Philadelphia Bar Association, disagrees with Lerner.
Gold said he suspects that it is rare for people to sue universities for discrimination and retaliation because colleges are likely to have good internal systems for handling complaints.
As a result, Gold said, complaints are likely to be dealt with before employees consider bringing forth lawsuits.
"The more sophisticated the institution, you'd think the internal systems for investigating these claims would work," he said. "You'd think at a place like Penn, something like this would not happen, but it is possible."
While Gold said he believes discrimination lawsuits are likely relatively uncommon against universities, he said that the number of discrimination lawsuits in general has increased in recent years because employees are learning more about their rights.
In both of the lawsuits filed at Penn over the summer, the plaintiffs claimed they were fired after they had lodged complaints of discrimination within the University's system.
Gold said that while discrimination lawsuits are difficult for plaintiffs to win, retaliation lawsuits are much more successful.
Retaliation is relatively easy to prove, Gold said, because the plaintiffs do not have to prove that they were discriminated against in order to prove they were retaliated against.
He added that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling further eased the burden of proof in retaliation lawsuits.
