Centerview settles 100-hour week disability suit before trial

Centerview Partners has settled a closely watched lawsuit that threatened to drag Wall Street’s “100-hour week” into open court, ending the case just before a Manhattan federal trial was due to begin, according to Business Insider.

The plaintiff, former Centerview junior analyst Kathryn Shiber, alleged the boutique investment bank violated US disability discrimination law when it fired her in 2020 after she said she needed eight to nine hours of sleep per night to manage a mood and anxiety disorder. Depositions in the case offered an unusually granular picture of junior banking life: first-year analysts testifying to 60–120 hour weeks and stretches where “in some projects, you are working 24 hours a day,” Business Insider reports. Centerview denied wrongdoing and said it remained confident it would have won at trial, but preferred to “put this distraction behind us.” Settlement terms were not disclosed.

Elite finance runs on extreme hours—everyone in the market already prices that into compensation and career optionality—but the model can persist until a lawsuit raises the cost. Investment banking is a partner-driven fee business with highly convex payoffs: a small number of deals and relationships produce most of the profit pool. Juniors are, economically, leveraged options on throughput. When demand spikes, the cheapest way to meet deadlines is to extend hours rather than maintain “idle” slack capacity year-round.

That logic is reinforced by the industry’s tournament structure. Analysts accept brutal conditions because the expected value is not the analyst salary; it is the probability-weighted path to private equity, hedge funds, or promotion. The bank benefits from a steady inflow of ambitious entrants who self-select into the grind. In game-theory terms, the equilibrium is sustained by credible signaling: surviving the workload is a screening device for stamina, conformity, and risk tolerance.

A public jury trial would have threatened that equilibrium by creating a different kind of cost—legal precedent and reputational damage. A verdict could also have clarified what counts as “reasonable accommodation” when the job is defined by unpredictability and client-driven deadlines. Settling avoids precedent, but the very act of settling signals to the rest of the Street that litigation risk is now part of the staffing equation.

Competitors can run a high-burn model as long as the expected cost of lawsuits and PR blowback stays below the cost of redesigning work. Once the legal tail risk rises—especially around mental health claims—firms may respond not by making the job humane, but by tightening documentation, shifting work to contractors, or formalizing “protected” roles that keep liability away from revenue-critical teams.

The settlement also highlights a broader institutional point: the harshest discipline on Wall Street often comes not from regulators or labor agencies, but from private legal exposure that threatens the franchise. When reputational capital becomes expensive, firms discover the virtues of “work-life balance”—at least on paper.