Category Archives: Litigation

Are Texas Businesses Liable for Employee Off-Duty Conduct?

It’s holiday time and that means that the good cheer at office parties may cause business owners and supervisors to worry if they can be liable for their employees’ off-duty conduct. For example, employers want to know if they have any responsibility when a intoxicated employee leaves the Christmas party and then goes home and assaults his wife.

The Texas Supreme Court first tackled liability for off-duty employee conduct in 2006 in the case of Loram Maintenance of Way, Inc. v. Ianni. The Court was asked to decide whether an employer owes a duty to protect the public from an employee’s wrongful off-duty conduct because the employer knew its employee was drug-impaired and had threatened violence to others.

The Texas Supreme Court found that the employer owed no such duty and therefore wasn’t liable for injuries to the El Paso police officer who was shot by Tingle, the impaired employee, when the officer tried to intervene in the employee’s after-hours domestic dispute.

TEXAS SUPREME COURT OPINION IN LORAM MAINTENANCE

In the Loram Maintenance case, the Texas Supreme Court reviewed involved an employer who put its employees on the road, working 12-hour shifts and traveling with their families, staying at motels paid for by the employer. There was evidence that the supervisor and co-workers used methamphetamine along with Tingle and that the supervisor had actually given Tingle time off to purchase more.

The employer had received reports prior to the incident that Tingle was seen using the drug at work and had threatened one of his wife’s friends with a knife. The day of the incident, while at work, Tingle spoke of attacking his wife. After his shift ended and Tingle had returned to the motel, Tingle began to argue with his wife and threatened her with a gun in a parking lot.

That is when the El Paso police officer intervened and was shot.  He was seriously injured and looked for compensation from the company that employed his assailant.

But the court pointed out in its opinion that the shooting incident didn’t occur until at least one hour after Tingle was already off duty and that there was no evidence that the employer was exercising any control over Tingle at that time. So even the employee was out of town on company business, and the incident happened at lodging provided by the company, and the employee was high (with the acquiescence and possible encouragement of his supervisor), and Tingle had been threatening violence that very day, the employer wasn’t liable. Tingle wasn’t on duty or otherwise under the employer’s control at the time of the shooting, so the company won. 

Therefore, current Texas law is that employers owe the public no duty to act to control the conduct of an off-duty employee. That is good news for employers in Texas who don’t want to be saddled with babysitting their employees’ behavior after work. There are attempts to chip away at this legal standard in Texas (i.e., the large verdict that a jury in Dallas awarded this summer against an employer for an off-duty crime), but no cases have overturned this Texas Supreme Court precedent to date.

EXCEPTION WHEN TAKING CONTROL OF IMPAIRED EMPLOYEES

But there is an exception created by the Texas Supreme Court that is important for employers to understand, particularly when company holiday parties are involved. “We have recognized a limited exception to this rule when an employer exercises control over the injury-causing conduct of its employee, imposing a duty, for example, when an employer sent an obviously intoxicated employee to drive home.” Nabors Drilling, U.S.A, Inc. v. Escoto (Tex. 2009).

That is the key to whether you as an employer will have any liability: whether you are taking any control at the time of the incident and whether it involves an incapacitated employee.

Continue reading Are Texas Businesses Liable for Employee Off-Duty Conduct?

How Employers Can Do Everything Right

University Medical Center in Lubbock won a big victory in an age discrimination case by doing everything right (suggesting to me that they followed the advice of their employment lawyers). Employers can learn eight important lessons from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision issued in the case of Salazar v. Lubbock County Hospital District d/b/a University Medical Center (opinion issued December 7, 2020).

Age discrimination cases are difficult for employers to win because the elderly make very sympathetic plaintiffs and the judges and jurors themselves are often older. But this case gives a blueprint to managers of how to dispassionately and carefully handle the termination of a poor-performing employee.

The allegations that plaintiff Rosemary Salazar asserted in this case sound really bad for the employer in an age-discrimination claim. Salazar had worked at the hospital for 27 years before she was fired in 2017 for poor performance and failure to change her behavior. She was 57 years old at the time of her termination and alleged not only was her firing discriminatory, but also that the same supervisor in her department fired three other long-time employees who were over the age of 60.

Salazar also claimed that she had been given good performance evaluations and that she had “received numerous raises for her job performance.” Finally she said that the employer did not follow its own progressive disciplinary policy in terminating her.

How did UMC manage to get a win the summary judgment motion and the appeal in this case? In a word: documentation.

Continue reading How Employers Can Do Everything Right

Texas Employer Requirements for the “Great Reopening”

Governor Greg Abbott is allowing retail businesses to reopen for curbside and home delivery on Friday, April 24, and is talking about allowing many other businesses, like hair salons, to reopen soon. But Texas employers should know that there are many requirements to protect your employees and customers from COVID-19 that you must address before you reopen.

The Department of State Health Services has condensed the “retail to go” requirements down to two pages here, and employment lawyers like me expect that similar precautions will be required as other businesses start to serve customers again.

The first decision an employer in the Texas Panhandle must face is whether to reopen at all. Gov. Abbott specifically said on Wednesday, April 22, in radio interviews, “there are some counties where the coronavirus outbreak is still progressing too rapidly, and they may not be able to fully participate in the initial phase of reopening until they get the spread of the coronavirus in their county under control.” Guess which counties he specifically named? Moore, Potter and Randall. Yes, friends, we are now a hot spot in Amarillo. The virus is not “under control” here, according to our governor.

Our area is seeing the kind of spike in COVID-19 cases that should make you at least carefully consider waiting to reopen. However, if you decide that economically you must open your retail business for curbside and delivery, or another business once allowed, here are the minimum requirements for employers, according to the DHSH guidance regarding the Texas Retail to Go Order:

Continue reading Texas Employer Requirements for the “Great Reopening”

10 Facts Texas Employers Should Know About Unemployment

Do I have to pay unemployment on my employee who just quit/resigned/got fired/was laid off?

During most of my thirty years as an employment lawyer, I have been asked that question at least once a week. Here are ten basic facts that every employer in Texas needs to understand about our state’s unemployment system: Continue reading 10 Facts Texas Employers Should Know About Unemployment

Transgender Woman Protected From Sex Discrimination, Court Decides

The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits an employer from discriminating against a transgender woman “on the basis of sex” and also ruled that the supervisor’s belief that gender transition “violates God’s commands” is not a defense to employment discrimination.

The Sixth Circuit, which decides federal cases brought in Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan and Ohio, reviewed the firing of Aimee Stephens from her job at a funeral home in which she had originally worked as a male in the case of EEOC v. R.G & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes (U.S. 2018)

After she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder, Stephens told her boss, Thomas Rost, that she was planning to transition to female. Her boss fired her. Rost stated during the lawsuit that he terminated Stephens’s employment because “he was no longer going to represent himself as a man” and that a person’s sex is “an immutable God-given fit”.

The Sixth Circuit decided, like the Second and Seventh Circuits (covering New York, Vermont, Connecticut and Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, respectively) before it, that a company violates an employee’s civil rights if the employer fires that worker on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity.

The funeral home where Stephens worked hoped that its termination of her would be protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (U.S. 2014).

However, almost three decades ago. the U.S. Supreme Court had already rejected the argument that a supervisor’s religious squeamishness was sufficient to overcome the civil rights laws. The United States Supreme Court ruled in Employment Division v. Smith (U.S. 1990) that a person may not defy neutral laws of general applicability even as an expression of religious belief. “To permit this,” wrote conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, “would make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Despite this long-standing Supreme Court precedent, the funeral home argued that the presence of a transgender employee would require Rost to leave his job, because forcing him to work with a transgender person was an infringement of his religious rights and also would “often create distractions for the deceased’s loved ones”. Continue reading Transgender Woman Protected From Sex Discrimination, Court Decides

White House Fails Basic “Firing 101”

Note: This is not a political post. President Donald Trump had the right and the authority to fire Acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates last night.

From an employment lawyer’s perspective, the White House’s written statement about Sally Yates’ firing is a textbook example of how I advise my employer clients not to behave. https://www.whitehouse.gov/…/statement-appointment-dana-boe…

“The acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States. . . . Ms. Yates is an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”

We employment lawyers encourage our business clients to leave a fired employee with his/her dignity. I would never suggest an employer use loaded words like “betrayed” and “weak” or to impugn a long-term, high-ranking employee’s integrity during a job termination meeting. It is ill-advised in most industries to burn bridges like this or to set your business up for a lawsuit by a scorned ex-employee.

Sometimes terminating an employee’s job is necessary. For advice on how to fire in a more beneficial way, read my blog post on firing without fear.

Employers Need Solid Reasons for Firing

Discrimination cases filed by former employees against their companies are usually won or lost on one concept—pretext—meaning that the reason given by the employer for the firing appears to the jury as a cover-up or excuse for the real reason, which the plaintiff will strongly suggest is discrimination. If the employer’s reason for firing the employee doesn’t perfectly line up with the facts developed in discovery and at trial, the business has a good chance of losing the case to the disgruntled employee.

Let me give you an example. If you fired Mary for being tardy on five specific occasions, but your security camera tapes, your time clock records, her emails and the testimony of other employees show she was not late on all of the dates that you specified, Mary’s discrimination case just got a big boost because your reasons look like pretext for terminating Mary. Then the door is wide open to say that her termination from employment occurred because she is black, a woman, disabled or born in another country.

When presented with this contrary hard evidence about Mary’s tardiness, it is not going to convince the jury when you say, “Oops, I got the dates of her tardies wrong” even if that is what actually happened. There is little a defense attorney can do to help you with the jury at that point because your reasons for the termination just look like an excuse for something more sinister.

Juries are pretty savvy in sifting through an employer’s reasons. As the employer, you must assure that the reasons you fire an employee are specific, provable, clearly-stated, well-documented and stay consistent from the time you first discipline the employee to the time of trial. Any variation in your reasons will come off looking like pretext.

Here are some other things that employers do that usually will be perceived as pretext in front of a jury: Continue reading Employers Need Solid Reasons for Firing

Follow Your Lawyer’s Advice

The case every lawyer has been waiting for was decided last month in the United States 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. A company trying to get out of an overtime violations case defended itself by saying it relied on the advice of its lawyer. But the court pointed out that the company had only selectively followed the attorney’s advice. The company ignored the second part of the legal advice it received and made no real changes in its compensation policy in response to the lawyer’s opinions. So the company’s defense failed. Mumby v. Pure Energy Services (USA), Inc., (10th Cir.)(Feb. 22, 2011).

Why is the case so meaningful to employment lawyers like me? Because too often, clients who pay me for my legal opinion decide to dismiss some or all of my advice if it means they will have to change the way they do business. So many companies are slow or unwilling to adapt and change, even when new employment laws or regulations require employers to rewrite their policies or update their procedures. They resist change even when it means they will be penalized or sued when they get caught. But they never believe they will get caught, despite statistics that show even small companies face an adverse claim by an employee or former employee at least once every five years.

Teenagers often use similar risky thinking when making bad decisions, such as “I won’t get caught if I drive home, even though I’ve been drinking beer all night. It was only a six-pack, after all!”  Continue reading Follow Your Lawyer’s Advice

Risks of Going to Trial

You’ve heard it before. Ninety-five percent of lawsuits settle before they are tried. Knowing this, doesn’t it make sense to study settlement and trial outcomes to see if settlement is usually a good idea? Some new research did just that and found that plaintiffs in lawsuits, such as the employee in a discrimination claim, who turn down a settlement offer often do much worse at trial than if they had taken amount the defendant was offering.

A new study in the September 2008 issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies found that 61% of plaintiffs who gambled on going to trial were disappointed with the outcome because they received a smaller award than the amount they had been offered to settle before trial. The average settlement offer was $48,700 and the average award at trial was only $43,000 in the more than 2000 cases decided in California between 2002 and 2005 that were included in the research.

It was an error for defendants to go to trial instead of paying a settlement demand in 24% of the cases reviewed. Unfortunately for those defendants that chose to go to trial, the price of that mistake was high. In those cases, the plaintiff’s average settlement demand was $770,900 but the average verdict was $1.9 million, meaning that $1.1 million could have been saved in those cases if the defendant had settled. Don’t forget that these verdicts occurred in California, so they don’t reflect conservative Panhandle jury awards, but the percentages are worth thinking about if your company is defending a lawsuit.

The study also looked specifically at employment law cases. Continue reading Risks of Going to Trial