Joseph M. Sellers, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he would pursue three routes: filing individual claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; slicing the giant class-action lawsuit into smaller ones that would have a better chance of advancement; and pursuing individual discrimination cases. “Instead of one case, this case will be splintered into many pieces,” he said in a call with reporters.

Wal-Mart’s lawyers disputed Mr. Sellers’s interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling, but the plaintiffs’ counsel had already been studying how to pursue smaller cases.

“One of the things we started a while ago doing is preparing and evaluating for a number of women filing charges with the E.E.O.C., probably individual charges, though some of them may be framed a little bit more broadly,” Mr. Sellers said in an interview. He plans to begin filing claims within one to two months, and might file up to several thousand of them, he added.

Mr. Sellers also said that although the justices had ruled that women who worked at Wal-Mart nationwide did not have enough in common to bring a class-action suit, “we read the decision by the majority as indicating that there may be the possibility of some smaller, more narrowly framed classes that could be pursued.”

“So we could end up with some cases framed store by store, or region by region,” he said.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers are still seeking complaints from female Wal-Mart employees who have been denied equal pay or promotion, via a Web site, WalmartClass.com. Brad Seligman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that more than 12,000 women had contacted the lawyers during the course of the suit, and that “I expect, after today, thousands more.”