Dive Brief:
- SHRM motioned for a new trial Friday in a case that last year resulted in a $11.5 million jury verdict against the HR organization, calling that decision “the result of passion, prejudice or bias” and “poisoned by the introduction of inadmissible evidence.”
- The federal judge presiding in Mohamed v. SHRM issued an erroneous jury instruction and permitted evidence and witness testimony that were inadmissible, SHRM alleged. The organization also claimed the judge mishandled the trial’s damages phases and improperly denied its request to exclude evidence and argument portraying SHRM as a “model employer.” Separately, SHRM alleged that the jury’s award was excessive.
- “We respect the judicial process and have every confidence in the facts supporting our newly filed legal arguments,” SHRM said in an email. Attorneys for the plaintiff did not respond to requests for comment.
Dive Insight:
Reaction to the jury’s December verdict swept the HR community, with commentators calling the case a cautionary moment for employers. But in its statement to HR Dive, SHRM maintained that it had been wrongly accused and that the evidence presented in Mohamed did not support the trial’s outcome.
“Discrimination and retaliation are fundamentally incompatible with our values, our policies, and our decades-long record of leadership in workplace compliance and inclusion,” SHRM said.
The plaintiff, a former employee, alleged in her 2022 lawsuit that SHRM “systematically favored” White employees over non-White employees. She claimed that, after she logged an internal complaint with her supervisor, SHRM’s HR staff worked with the supervisor to retaliate against her and had drafted termination documents before fully investigating her claims.
In Friday’s filing, SHRM alleged that the judge improperly admitted testimony related to a separate former SHRM employee who complained of race discrimination but who never testified at trial. The organization said that this testimony — as well as a set of out-of-court notes and related statements compiled by another witness — constituted inadmissible hearsay. A third witness who testified about her observations of SHRM’s treatment of the plaintiff failed to complete legally-required disclosures and also should have been excluded, SHRM claimed.
Throughout the case, SHRM had sought to distance itself from the “model employer” phrase that had once appeared in its own programming. In its latest filing, SHRM said the phrase was irrelevant to the plaintiff’s claims and created a “substantial risk of unfair prejudice” but was nonetheless permitted.
“By portraying SHRM as a ‘model employer,’ Plaintiff improperly appealed to the jury’s emotions and moral judgment, creating a substantial risk that the verdict rested on perceived hypocrisy rather than the evidence,” SHRM said Friday.