Another Intern Sues

It’s just the latest in a wave of such lawsuits but, this time, it comes with a twist: Because she was hired by ICM at the end of her internship, the company has asked the judge to dismiss the case and send it instead to mandatory arbitration as required by her employment contract, according to the New York Times.

Attorneys for Kimberly Behzadi, who has since been laid off, filed the suit seeking class-action status for more than 200 who interned at ICM. Behzadi said in court papers that ICM violated U.S. Labor Department rules that allow companies not to pay interns if they satisfy certain criteria.

“The interns at ICM were doing the hands-on work of the company on a day-to-day basis,” Behzadi’s lawyer, Rachel Bien, told the Times. “The work they did was of immediate advantage to the company. They’re doing the same work as the paid assistants there.”

ICM responded that its internship program is educational and satisfies government criteria. Behzadi said that as an intern she worked from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. four days a week, read and summarized scripts, answered phones, did expense accounts for agents and maintained the weekly calendar of comedy events, according to the Times.

Behzadi reportedly interned January through May 2012, and was hired as a full-time assistant the following November.

At that time, she signed an agreement that “any and all disputes arising out of or in any way relation to my employment with the company shall be resolved” through arbitration. She was laid off in December 2013, according to the paper.

ICM’s legal filings say that Behzadi’s “claims must be adjudicated in arbitration – and only in arbitration.”

The legal papers reportedly add that that the arbitration agreement she signed said she was waiving her rights to have any claim “decided by a court or in a jury trial.”

Bien argued, among other things, that the arbitration agreement signed in November 2012 should not cover Bahzadi’s work as an unpaid intern months before, calling the move “an overreach.”