Sedgwick’s chairman, Michael F. Healy, called Ms. Ribeiro’s claims “baseless” and said in a statement that he “was confident there has been absolutely no discrimination or retaliation in the partner compensation process or otherwise.”

Another lawyer at a major firm, Kamee Verdrager, recently won a ruling in Massachusetts allowing her case against her former employer, Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo of Boston, to go to trial. She contends that the firm reduced her seniority by two years — which affected her level of pay — then later fired her. Ms. Verdrager has been pursuing her case for seven years. Mintz Levin said in a statement that “we are confident that the claims have no merit and that we will prevail at trial.”

Law is not the only profession where there have been accusations that women have been treated unfairly. Unequal pay for women has arisen as an issue in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and for the United States women’s national soccer team.

“There is more sunlight now,” said Michele Coleman Mayes, chairwoman of the American Bar Association’s commission on women in the profession and general counsel of the New York Public Library. “Women are no longer going to be cowed into believing that they have to stay silent or suffer the label that says ‘undesirable colleague.’”

Women are graduating from law schools in droves and now make up almost 45 percent of law firm associates. Yet that growth has not been reflected in the higher levels of law firms.

A decade ago, women held 16 percent of big-law partnerships. Today, they are at 18 percent, according to the American Bar Association.

As a result, according to a 2014 survey by the National Association of Women Lawyers, female partners routinely earn only 80 percent of what their male counterparts earn. The roughly $125,000 annual difference amounts to a pay loss of more than $1 million for each female lawyer over a decade.