A federal judge in North Carolina shot down Morgan Stanley’s effort to vacate a more than $1.5 million arbitration award of damages and attorney fees, despite the investment banking giant’s arguments that the arbitrator slept through significant portions of the arbitration hearings.
In a Feb. 7 opinion, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina ruled that the bank could not overturn the award granted to former Charlotte Morgan Stanley employee Charles Randall, who sued the bank for alleged age and gender discrimination when they replaced him with a younger male. U.S. District Judge Frank D. Whitney rejected Morgan Stanley’s argument that the arbitrator’s misconduct—including alleged sleeping through testimonies, evident bias, and wrongly awarding punitive damages—justified vacating the award, which included more than $500,000 in compensatory and punitive damages, as well as $1 million in attorney fees.