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October 28, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — A Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel reversed and remanded a Texas federal judge’s ruling rejecting a former Union Pacific Railroad Co. conductor’s assertion that he was entitled to American Pipe & Construction Co. v. Utah tolling in an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) suit filed over denial of a follow-up vision test needed to remove work restrictions, finding that the company did “not prevail” because the employee “was not unambiguously excluded from” a previously filed class action’s revised class definition.
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October 28, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Employees of an airline filed a petition for writ of certiorari seeking high court review of the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ ruling affirming a lower court’s dismissal of their suit alleging in part that their employer’s protocols related to the COVID-19 pandemic created a hostile work environment, asserting that the appellate court should have given “weight to the allegation that the refusal was religious.”
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October 28, 2026
HONOLULU — The Hawaii Supreme Court in a ruling addressing a nearly three-decade-long pesticide exposure case by banana plantation workers said the appropriate approach to causation in mass toxic tort cases is set out in comment g in Section 26 of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm, but that the three factors must be considered in a different order.
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October 28, 2026
HOUSTON — A business development manager sued her employer in a Texas court alleging injury and retaliation after she filed a workers’ compensation claim in connection with injuries she alleged that she suffered after being told during a training tour of a Wyoming facility to place her head into multiple frac tanks without any personal protective equipment (PPE).
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October 28, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rejecting a challenge filed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to an arbitration award issued over the department’s implementation of a presidential memorandum that ordered federal employees to return to in-person work, the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) held that HHS failed to establish any valid grounds to overturn the award and flagged a litany of “fictitious, erroneous, or irrelevant” citations in its brief supporting its exceptions to the award that may have derived from the use of a generative artificial intelligence tool.
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October 28, 2026
NEW YORK — A New York federal judge granted summary judgment to federal employee unions and current and former federal employees on their Administrative Procedure Act (APA) claims challenging the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) access to sensitive personnel records maintained by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), finding that OPM violated the Privacy Act by granting DOGE agents broad access to records containing personally identifiable information (PII) without a demonstrated need and failed to adhere to established cybersecurity safeguards, but reserved a determination on whether permanent injunctive relief is warranted.
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October 26, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — Following recent amendments to the Healthy Airport Ordinance (HAO) that the city and county of San Francisco had enacted in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a trade group’s lawsuit challenging the ordinance was dismissed without prejudice pursuant to a settlement agreement.
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October 23, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — A Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Oct. 22 vacated a preliminary injunction in a putative class lawsuit barring enforcement of a new Mississippi law, House Bill 1193, that prevents government-run schools and post-secondary institutions from requiring diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) activities and ordered that the case must be reassigned on remand to a different judge, calling the trial court proceedings “a botch job.”
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October 22, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued a mandate on Oct. 21 of a majority’s judgment and opinion affirming a Texas federal judge’s grant of summary judgment to a faith-based auto repair business that franchises only to Christians in a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by a Jewish man who was denied a franchise, rejecting the man’s “novel argument” that “discrimination against Jews is ipso facto racial discrimination” under 42 U.S. Code Section 1981.
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October 22, 2026
NEW YORK — A federal judge approved a proposal for a former employee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) to receive more than half of the net proceeds of a confidential settlement amount over claims that the bank failed to accommodate her religious beliefs when it denied her request for permanent exemption from its COVID-19 vaccination policy while denying additional compensation for her former legal counsel.
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October 22, 2026
FORT MYERS, Fla. — A data privacy putative class action survived a motion to dismiss after a Florida federal judge found that the alleged publication of the wife’s personal information on the dark web and her husband’s efforts to mitigate the resulting risk of identity theft sufficiently allege injury.
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October 21, 2026
RICHMOND, Va. — Affirming judgments in favor of a Maryland man who alleged that his religious employer violated federal and state discrimination laws by terminating dependent health insurance benefits for his same-sex spouse, a split Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held that neither state nor federal statutes nor the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution “provide such broad immunity” to shield the employer “from liability because its discriminatory action is rooted in its sincerely held religious beliefs.”
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October 21, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the latest litigation in a more than eight-year-long bargaining dispute, the National Labor Relations Board and an employees’ union waived their rights to file responses to two petitions for writ of certiorari filed in the U.S. Supreme Court by a road construction company seeking review of how courts must interpret an agency rule created through adjudication and whether dismissed employee petitions to decertify a union can be shielded from judicial review.
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October 21, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — The parties in an Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit seeking millions in severance benefits for a putative class of former Twitter Inc. employees have reached an unspecified settlement in principle, they told a California federal court in a joint filing.
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October 20, 2026
SEATTLE — The owner and operator of several Potbelly Sandwich Shop restaurants appealed a Washington federal court’s dismissal of its breach of contract lawsuit seeking employment practices liability coverage for an underlying putative class action alleging that it violated the Washington Equal Pay and Opportunities Act, arguing to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that the lower court erred by failing to apply the “liberal-construction principles” that govern coverage disputes under Washington law and misapplied Washington law when it analyzed the insurance policy and underlying allegations.
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October 20, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Labor on Oct. 19 issued Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-1, which withdraws three opinion letters that addressed whether a worker is a “tipped employee” under Section 3(t) of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the department’s “dual jobs” regulation and confirms that previously withdrawn 80/20 work percentage guidance concerning when employers can take tip credits for tipped employees performing related, nontipped duties no longer reflects the department’s policy.
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October 20, 2026
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — A Texas appellate court withdrew its prior opinion and substituted a new opinion, which, like the prior opinion, reverses a lower court’s order denying dismissal and renders judgment dismissing with prejudice claims against an automobile dealership in a negligence and wrongful death suit against it related to a former employee’s death, finding that the spouse’s amended expert report did not provide the factual and scientific basis connecting the dealership’s alleged failure to act to the decedent contracting COVID-19.
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October 19, 2026
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As two wrongful death lawsuits remain pending in a state court, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) cited the designer and the construction contractor of the Canyon Tunnel near Knights Ferry in Stanislaus County, Calif., for a total of $212,500 in proposed penalties after a collapse that killed one worker and injured another.
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October 19, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 19 denied a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by a member of the National Labor Relations Board who was fired by President Donald J. Trump in January 2025 even though her term was not set to expire until March 2028.
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October 19, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 19 denied a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by a subsidiary of a multinational building materials company in a years-long legal dispute following a union election that sought review of whether appellate courts and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are required to account for post-election changed circumstances, specifically the passage of time and significant turnover, before enforcing a bargaining order under NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co., Inc. instead of ordering a rerun vote.
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October 16, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — A split Pennsylvania appeals court on Oct. 15 affirmed a trial court’s $725 million judgment for a service station worker diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and $500,000 for the man’s wife after a jury determined that Exxon Mobil Corp.’s predecessor in interest manufactured and sold defective gasoline containing benzene.
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October 16, 2026
DETROIT — A Michigan bank agreed to pay $31.5 million — including $10.5 million in attorney fees, $311,690.80 in litigation costs and monetary relief and credit monitoring for class members — in a class action settlement after the bank experienced two cyberattacks resulting in data breaches impacting more than 2.18 million employees and customers whose data was compromised.
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October 15, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Arguing that the questions presented are meritless and were not properly preserved in the lower courts for U.S. Supreme Court review, federal judicial branch officials and administrators that were sued in their official capacities in a workplace harassment and discrimination case say the high court should deny a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by a former assistant federal public defender asking whether the judiciary’s internal employment dispute resolution (EDR) plan for handling workplace discrimination and harassment complaints complies with constitutional and legal protections.
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October 15, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After the U.S. Supreme Court’s prior denial of certiorari in a putative class suit alleging wrongful termination related to former employees’ refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine, a similar petition for certiorari by the employees in their individual capacities on Oct. 14 was distributed for conference; in the instant suit, the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of the employees’ suit.
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October 13, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Declining to review a ruling concerning surcharge under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 13 denied a certiorari petition filed by participants in “top-hat” deferred compensation and retirement plans; in an amicus curiae brief filed at the high court’s request, the U.S. government opined that the surcharge issue was wrongly decided but that “this case’s idiosyncratic factual context makes it an unsuitable vehicle for clarifying the propriety of surcharge relief.”