Your company's next employment plaintiff might not have a lawyer. 

But they have ChatGPT, unlimited discovery and motions to draft, and all the time in the world. You have attorneys who bill by the hour. 

That's a problem. 

Pro se employment filings jumped 56% in 2025, from 4,100 to 6,400. Lex Machina's 2026 report found unrepresented plaintiffs filed more than 16% of federal employment cases in 2025, up from under 10% in 2021. I expect that number to keep growing. 

AI is helping fuel the surge. A chatbot can draft a professional-looking complaint and churn out motions in minutes. It can also reinforce what an unrepresented plaintiff wants to believe about the strength and value of their case.

Take Donaldson v. Hiland Dairy. A magistrate judge recommended dismissing a former employee's Title VII claim as time-barred. He responded with 29 objections totaling 677 pages, much of it AI-generated answers to Google searches that had little to do with the limitations issue. The Texas federal court dismissed the case with prejudice.

By one estimate, defending a pro se case costs 10% to 15% more than a typical employment claim. Here's why.

A plaintiff's lawyer is a filter. They decline cases that aren't worth bringing, tell clients when a claim is weaker than they hoped, and put a realistic number on what it's worth. Lex Machina found that pro se plaintiffs frequently get knocked out on procedural defenses like failure to exhaust administrative remedies or the statute of limitations. A lawyer would likely have caught those problems before anything was filed.

Then there's the math. The plaintiff isn't paying a lawyer. You are. They can generate another motion in mere minutes. Your attorneys spend billable hours figuring out how to respond.

And the usual exit ramp is harder to find. Pro se cases settle far less often than represented ones, frequently because plaintiffs have unrealistic expectations about damages, and nobody has reset them. Among cases decided on the merits, these plaintiffs lose at better than 40 to 1. You'll probably win. You'll just pay for the whole trip.

So what do you do? Treat it as a real lawsuit. Courts still read pro se filings generously, and a sloppy response is how a weak case gets a second life. Raise exhaustion and limitations defenses early, and push for a scheduling order and discovery limits before the motions pile up.

Then tell your CFO to budget more, not less. And if those AI-generated filings cross the line into frivolous, talk to your lawyer about whether Rule 11 sanctions could recover some of the fees spent responding.

Pro se used to mean cheap. Not anymore.

      

That's how this story allegedly began for Boeing employee VyVy Nguyen.

According to a lawsuit just filed in Washington state court, Nguyen's supervisor encouraged her to entertain the advances of senior manager Brandon Mitchell, telling her, "It could benefit us all." 

Then it got much worse.

When she became pregnant and refused to have an abortion, Mitchell allegedly wanted nothing further to do with her or their child.

Surely HR stepped in? Not according to the lawsuit. Nguyen says her supervisor told coworkers about her pregnancy and suggested she could lose her job. She reported it to HR, which assigned an investigator who interviewed her but allegedly never followed up. In November, she is expected to return to her regular assignment, under the same supervisor, in the same building as Mitchell.

She sued for hostile work environment and disparate treatment. She also alleges negligent hiring and retention. According to the complaint, Mitchell's girlfriend told her he had been fired from a prior job for sexual misconduct and had a history with subordinates. If Boeing knew, or should have known, that's an even stronger liability case.

These are allegations, not proven facts. Boeing and the individual defendants deserve their day in court. But if even a fraction of this complaint is substantiated, it's a spectacular failure of workplace accountability.

Employers, a beautifully written anti-harassment policy is worthless if management ignores it, enables the misconduct, or participates in it.

Boeing builds airplanes. It knows catastrophic failures rarely happen without warning signs. The same is true of workplace harassment.

If even some of these allegations are proven, Boeing will have more than earned its place on my list of 2026's worst employers.

      

"Making a mountain out of a molehill."

That's what TransDigm's then-CEO allegedly told its general counsel when she raised a pattern of sexual assault and harassment at the company's management meetings. An Ohio appellate court just sent her entire case to a courtroom instead of an arbitrator.

She reported 2021 and 2024. Both men were fired. She alleges each still got a substantial severance package, with no contract requiring one.

She also alleges that CEO Michael Lisman asked what she did to cause the 2024 assault and why it took so long to report. He allegedly told her that he doubted a woman with a family could be general counsel. He called harassment training a "waste of time." And in July 2025, she was told she'd be replaced by "an objectively less qualified male."

Warren sued. The trial court dismissed her discrimination, harassment, and retaliation claims, and stayed the rest of the case, including a breach of contract claim, under the arbitration clause in her employment agreement.

The appellate court reversed. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act lets a person alleging harassment elect court over a predispute arbitration agreement. If the harassment claim survives a motion to dismiss, it is "by definition nonfrivolous," and the EFAA applies.

Warren's survived. TransDigm argued that firing both men was corrective action and that the conduct wasn't severe or pervasive. The court called those proof questions, not pleading questions. The retaliation claim survived too.

Then the kicker. The EFAA doesn't just free the harassment claims. The agreement is unenforceable as to the entire case. Thus, even a claim for breach of the very agreement that contains the arbitration clause is not arbitrable and must be heard in court.

So here's my bigger question: do you really want arbitration anyway? Businesses favor arbitration for privacy, speed, lower fees, and less risk of a jackpot jury verdict. In my experience, however, it doesn't limit discovery, shorten the case, cut the expense, or hedge your risk. In fact, because you pay for the arbitrator's time, it often costs more.

If privacy matters most to your business, by all means keep using arbitration clauses. Just know that one sexual harassment claim is going to shred that agreement. 

Otherwise, before you put a broad arbitration clause in your next agreement, consider a jury-trial waiver instead, which at least hedges against a runaway jury.

Arbitration promises privacy. It rarely delivers anything else, assuming its it's enforceable in your case at all. And if it rarely delivers, why require it in the first place?

     

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Yesterday morning, my wife, son, and I voted. 

Do you know the rules around providing time off to your employees to vote? 

In fact, 27 other states and Washington, D.C. have similar laws. 

The Ohio statute is short. No set number of hours. No advance notice from the employee. No posting requirement. Just "reasonable." 

Pay is where employers get tripped up. The Ohio Attorney General has said you don’t have to pay hourly employees for voting time, but you can’t dock a salaried employee’s pay for it.

The statute also does more than protect the trip to the polls. It bars you from requiring an employee to go with you to vote. It bars you from refusing to let an employee serve as an election official. And it bars you from using threats or intimidation to push someone to vote, or not vote, a certain way. 

The penalty is $50 to $500. That's a small fine. The story about the employer who fired someone for voting is not small and has the potential to do way more reputational damage to your business.

Election Day is November 3. Tell your managers now, not at 4:45 that afternoon when an employee asks to leave early. 

Ohio has early voting, so point your employees toward it. But if someone needs time on Election Day, don't make them argue for it. 

And if your business is outside Ohio or you have employees located outside Ohio, check those states. Many require paid time off. Some require you to post a notice about it. 

Voting leave is one of the few employment leave laws you can explain in a sentence. There is no excuse not to follow it.

Here's what I read this week that you should read, too. 

Your Chatbot Can't Keep a Secret: Why Employers Still Need Lawyers (For Now) — Dan Schwartz's Connecticut Employment Law Blog 

Could Your HR Chatbot Leak Sensitive Data? — EntertainHR 

Leaders Need to Grapple with Employee Ambivalence on AI — Harvard Business Review

Keeping up with the evolving landscape of trade secret law in the wake of AI — Fair Competition Law  

Inside Anthropic, Every Employee Now Manages Agents — TLNT 

How Law Schools Are Teaching Students to Use AI Responsibly — Indisputably

Bad HR Isn't the Real Problem. CEOs Who Blame HR for Their Decisions Are — Improve Your HR by Suzanne Lucas, the Evil HR Lady 

All or Nothing? Second Circuit Clarifies Scope of Sexual Harassment Arbitration Law — Employment Law Worldview  

EEOC moves to rescind enforcement guidance on criminal background checks — Staffing Industry Analysts  

Instacart settles federal claims of discrimination against US-born job seekers — AP  

4 must-haves for your workplace accommodation policy — Employment & Labor Insider 

Did Explaining a Religious Objection After Refusing to Escort a Transgender Spa Guest Come Too Late? — Eric Meyer's Employer Handbook Blog  

DOL rescinds potentially 'misread' tip rule opinion letters in FLSA enforcement shift — HR Dive  '

My coworker insists on being called "Dr." — Ask a Manager 

     

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A nurse who spent years publicly calling her college racist asks one question at a staff conference: will HR have to take implicit-bias training? A week later, the HR vice president angrily confronts her. 

Is this retaliation? Not according to the 6th Circuit in Burton v. Centre College of Kentucky.

Cheryl Burton worked as a nurse at Centre from 2017 to 2023. She alleged that Black applicants were passed over for less-qualified white ones. She said so publicly, backed a student sit-in, and joined students demanding change. In 2021, she told HR VP Kay Drake she was quitting "to escape the culture of racism at Centre." Drake promised change and a raise, and Burton stayed. Change allegedly never came.

Then came an August 2023 conference and her question about HR and implicit-bias training. Drake allegedly came to her office and angrily asked why she felt the need to ask. The next day, VP of Student Life Barbara LoMonaco allegedly said Burton had "no right to have asked the question about implicit-bias training at the conference" and "we can't hire every black person that applies here." When Burton relayed her husband's warning that she'd become "a target," LoMonaco paused and said, "Well…" 

Retaliation requires a materially adverse action, one that could dissuade a reasonable worker from complaining. Two upbraidings were closer to "petty slights or minor annoyances." If two written reprimands fell short in an earlier case, two angry conversations do too. "Well…" was a veiled intimation, not a threat. And Drake had been receptive to Burton's earlier complaints, so her history didn't help.

Constructive discharge failed too. An employee "is obliged not to assume the worst." Quitting a day later, fearing things might deteriorate, doesn't qualify. Declining to reassure someone isn't announcing that the axe is about to fall.

The employer won this case because of what happened after the angry conversation—nothing. No reprimand. No schedule change. No extra scrutiny. Burton quit before any of that could start. 

Don't mistake that for a green light. A manager telling an employee she had "no right to ask" a question about race is a line a plaintiff's lawyer will happily read aloud. Add one real adverse action, and those comments become the opening act of a retaliation case. 

Train your leaders for the moment right after someone raises a race concern. The only good response is curiosity: what are you seeing, and what should we look at? Then write it down, and leave the employee's work life exactly where it was. 

A motion to dismiss is a great result. Better to never put your business in a position to need one.

     

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