It is the norm for high-achieving employees to strive for and tout their successes. Recently, however, one person’s novel reaction to failure—his own termination—may show a future employer as much about his character as any of his considerable accomplishments.

Sree Sreenivasan was plucked from Columbia’s School of Journalism a few years ago to become the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chief digital officer. According to Quartz, Mr. Sreenivasan brought the famed museum into the digital age through inventive social outreach efforts and a revamped, mobile-friendly website.

• Discrimination
• Social Media
• Statutes of limitation‎s
• Termination With or Without Cause
• The Inbox

Employers with an eye to the regulatory horizon are aware that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has proposed expanding its annual Employer Information Report (EEO-1) to include data on employees’ pay.

The existing EEO-1 requires private employers with 100 or more employees to report the number of employees within 10 job categories by seven race and ethnicity categories, as well as by sex.

The proposed changes will further refine reporting to include employee counts as well as total hours worked by 12 pay bands.

• Discrimination
• Equal Pay

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission scored a victory last week against PMT Corp., a Minnesota-based medical device and equipment manufacturer. According to the commission’s complaint filed nearly two years ago, PMT Corp. engaged in systematic discriminatory hiring practices by refusing to hire women and individuals over the age of 40 in violation of Title VII and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. According to Law 360, PMT agreed to settle the suit for $1.02 million payable to a class of applicants and a former PMT Human Resources professional who brought the company’s hiring practices to the EEOC’s attention.

• Age Discrimination
• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination
• The Inbox

The turn of the calendar is always a good time to reflect on what has come before and preview what lies ahead. In this post, we count down our most popular posts of 2015 about executive disputes. Later, we’ll look at what to expect in 2016.

• Age Discrimination
• Bankruptcy
• Breach of Contract
• Civil Litigation
• D&O
• Data Security
• Discrimination
• Executive Compensation
• Indemnification and Advancement
• Intellectual Property
• Noncompete Agreements ‎
• Severance Agreements
• Wrongful Termination

When the 2015 college football season started, Steve Sarkisian was a rising star in the coaching firmament. He had led the University of Washington Huskies and his current team, the University of Southern California Trojans, to winning records and bowl games.

In late August, however, reports surfaced that Sarkisian had behaved inappropriately at a booster event, the Salute to Troy. And by mid-October, USC had terminated Sarkisian “for cause,” with athletic director Pat Haden explaining that Sarkisian’s use of alcohol had impaired his performance of his job.

This week, Sarkisian struck back, filing a 14-count complaint against USC in Los Angeles Superior Court.

• Breach of Contract
• Discrimination
• Termination With or Without Cause

Ellen Pao may not have won her gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins, but she may have inspired numerous women working in Silicon Valley who identified with her cause. According to Fortune, employment lawyers are seeing a heightened awareness among women that the workplace issues they face, and that Ms. Pao articulated in her case, are perhaps more widespread than not. This “Pao Effect” has Kay Lucas, a San Francisco-based employment law attorney, fielding twice as many calls each week from potential clients with workplace gender discrimination concerns. Kelly Dermody, a partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, has litigated gender discrimination cases for a decade, and told Fortune that her clients now have a heightened willingness to speak out. Lucas also said that companies are more inclined to settle instead of allowing information to become public, and as we observed with the Pao trial, highly publicized. Lucas noted that many of her clients’ complaints share similar themes involving exclusion from important meetings and denied access to the circles of influence. Yet, she said to Fortune, “these women are not particularly angry; they’re ambitious. They’re not victims; they want to be participants.”

A quick search of legal news gives this “Pao Effect” additional credibility.  According to Law 360, Heather McCloskey recently sued Paymentwall, Inc. for sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation and failure to take reasonable steps to prevent harassment and discrimination. Ms. McCloskey alleged that executive Benoit Boisset routinely harassed her, calling attention to her physical appearance in a demeaning manner. As she became more vocal in her objections, Boisset used expletives when referring to her, and ultimately terminated her employment. McCloskey also described the workplace environment as young, predominantly male and lacking any formalized set of rules or policies. Kelly Dermody cited these kinds of workplace dynamics as partially to blame for the volume of complaints arising from Silicon Valley. She opined to Fortune that many tech companies take off “really quickly without a lot of attention to human resources.” Consequently, “you have a lot of young managers who make young managers’ mistakes,” which might encompass many of the alleged missteps in the Paymentwall case.

• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination

The ongoing trial in Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers has made headline news across the country.  It’s being covered by the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, among other national publications.  Those interested in following the trial can monitor the #ellenpao hashtag on Twitter, or watch liveblogs from Re/code or the San Jose Mercury-News.

Why is the trial so newsworthy?  As we reported here, Pao claims that Kleiner Perkins, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm, discriminated against her because of her gender and then retaliated because she complained.  She claims that she was not promoted to a plum senior partner position because she was a woman, and that the firm fired her because she complained and later sued it.  Her story involves sex, boorish behavior, and office intrigue that ranges from the mundane to the highly dramatic.

With that introduction, here are some -- of many -- takeaways for employers from what has transpired thus far:

• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination
• Title VII

Craig Watts, a chicken farmer from North Carolina, recently brought a whistleblower complaint against Perdue, claiming that the poultry seller retaliated against him for bringing certain animal welfare claims to light.  Mr. Watts owns the farm on which the chickens are raised, but, according to the Government Accountability Project, the terms and conditions of the farm operations are strictly governed by the poultry giant. The Food Integrity Campaign (a program operated by the Government Accountability Project) filed the action on behalf of Mr. Watts, defending his right to speak out about the conditions on the farm, which Watts claims run far “afowl” of Perdue’s marketing claims of “cage-free” and “humanely-raised” chickens. After publicizing the conditions on his farm, Watts was placed on a performance improvement plan and is routinely subjected to surprise audits of his farm.

A former executive at L.A.’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising is seeing red over the school’s termination of her employment, which allegedly came after she demanded more diverse branding in the school’s publications. Tamar Rosenthal filed a civil rights complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court alleging that the school, seemingly interested only in shades of white, opposed her attempts to showcase student diversity on the website and explicitly advised her not to showcase gay, black or non-white students in any school publications.  According to My News LA, the complaint further alleged that Ms. Rosenthal’s supervisors created an “ultra-conservative, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim political atmosphere in the school’s front office.”

• Discrimination
• Poaching
• The Inbox
• Whistleblowers

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard argument in the religious discrimination case of EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc., which made our list as one of our five issues to watch for 2015.  The case arises under Title VII, the federal law that makes it illegal for an employer “to discriminate against any individual with respect to h[er] compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s . . . religion.”  The EEOC alleges that Abercrombie, purveyor of “authentic American clothing,” discriminated against Samantha Elauf on religious grounds.  The company refused to hire Elauf because she wore a headscarf, or hijab, to her job interview, and the company’s “Look Policy” prohibited employees from wearing “caps.” 

In earlier depositions in the case, Elauf’s interviewer at Abercrombie testified that she “assumed that [Elauf] was Muslim,” and “figured that was the religious reason why she wore her head scarf.”  The interviewer said that she went to her district manager to discuss the headscarf issue, and told him that “[Elauf] wears the head scarf for religious reasons, I believe.”  The interviewer testified that the district manager then told her not to hire Elauf because of the headscarf and said, “[S]omeone can come in and paint themselves green and say they were doing it for religious reasons, and we can’t hire them.”  As a result, the interviewer lowered Elauf’s “appearance” score on her evaluation, and Elauf didn’t get the job.

Despite this testimony, the Tenth Circuit still entered summary judgment for Abercrombie, holding that the EEOC’s discrimination claim could not proceed to trial because Elauf “never informed Abercrombie prior to its hiring decision that she wore her headscarf or ‘hijab’  for religious reasons and that she needed an accommodation for that practice, due to a conflict between the practice and Abercrombie’s clothing policy.” 

The fact that the Tenth Circuit granted summary judgment, even though the interviewer admitted that she assumed that Elauf wore the scarf for religious reasons, helps explain the concerns, and potential solutions, that the Justices raised in yesterday’s argument. 

• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination
• Religious Discrimination‎
• Title VII

Silicon Valley is buzzing about the trial in Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers LLP, which got underway on Tuesday.  According to USA Today, a UC-Berkeley professor says that you “can’t be within a stone’s throw of the Valley without hearing” about the case.

The cast of characters (described here by the San Francisco Business Times) includes a number of heavy hitters, including Pao herself.  Pao, a graduate of Princeton, Harvard Law, and Harvard Business School, is now the CEO of Reddit.  Kleiner Perkins is a well-known venture capital firm in Menlo Park, a city that has been described as the “center of the venture capital universe.”

Pao’s allegations are explosive.  She contends that she had a brief affair with a married junior partner who continued to harass her after she broke off their relationship.  Her claims about the firm go deeper than just this harassment; she contends that the firm had an overarching culture of discrimination against women, culminating in her dismissal in October 2012. 

• Arbitration
• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination
• Wrongful Termination