After employment claims ran their course, a stockholder tried a new angle: dressing up workplace harassment as a fiduciary-duty lawsuit. The court wasn’t persuaded. Continue reading
Safety policies should protect workplaces, not produce eight-figure ADA exposure. This case shows how a rigid medical rule, applied without individualized assessment, can turn a routine injury into a litigation disaster.
TL;DR: A jury found that an employer violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and Oregon disability law by enforcing a blanket medical policy that unlawfully screened out an employee instead of evaluating his actual abilities. The jury issued an advisory award that included $25 million in punitive damages, and the court declined to disturb the verdict.
This case is a reminder that the ADA interactive process is about engagement, not just documentation. When an employer waits too long, courts start asking why.
That question sat at the center of this dispute and ultimately kept the case alive. Continue reading
Sometimes retaliation isn’t loud. There’s no demotion, no firing, no pay cut. It shows up quietly instead – more work than everyone else gets, repeated just often enough to send a message.
That kind of retaliation can be harder to spot, but as a recent decision out of the District of Columbia shows, it can still land an employer in serious trouble. Continue reading
In an ADA retaliation case, a positive marijuana test looked like a clean exit. It wasn’t.
What tripped up the employer wasn’t the test result itself, but how the termination decision unfolded around it – including uneven discipline, disputed facts, and timing tied to disability-related absences. Continue reading
Failure-to-accommodate claims usually turn on what an employer didn’t do.
Here, the more interesting question was whether there was any ADA duty to begin with. Continue reading
Employers often assume that launching an investigation is a safe harbor.
The Tenth Circuit just delivered a reminder that when decisionmakers rely on a flawed investigation, the process can matter as much as the decision itself.
TL;DR: The Tenth Circuit revived two Title VII retaliation claims after a physician reported alleged sexual harassment by another doctor and was later terminated and reported to a state licensing board. Although an investigation alone is rarely actionable retaliation, the court held a jury could find that a one-sided internal investigation – including skipped interviews, selective fact-gathering, and uncritical reliance by senior decisionmakers – supplied the retaliatory animus and causation for materially adverse actions under a cat’s paw theory.
Retaliation requires awareness. Without it, there’s no causal link—no matter how suspicious the timing may feel. A recent Third Circuit decision underscores a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil reality employers should understand. Continue reading
The EEOC’s decision to pull back from investigating disparate impact claims has been loud, controversial, and headline-worthy. And for employees watching their charges get administratively closed in real time, it can feel like the agency has simply walked away. But federal courts are not there to referee agency priorities or second-guess investigations.
TL;DR: A federal court dismissed an employee’s lawsuit against the EEOC after the agency administratively closed her disparate-impact charge following a shift in enforcement priorities. The court held that charging parties have no judicially cognizable right to a particular EEOC investigation, and no standing to force the agency to reopen one. Whatever the EEOC does or does not do, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 claims are litigated de novo against the employer – not the agency.
Sometimes courts resolve complex employment issues. And sometimes they are asked whether an employee suffered legal harm because she didn’t get to say goodbye to coworkers.
Buckle up. Continue reading
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