Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

The results are in: attorneys are filing more employment law cases in court.  Indeed, year-end reporting from legal databases like LexMachina confirm that the pace of filing new employment discrimination cases reached its highest level in 2025, surpassing 20,000 new filings nationwide.  Though overtime and minimum wage lawsuits under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have continued to decline since 2015, discrimination cases under laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act are on the rise.

On June 5, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services that plaintiffs alleging employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are not required to meet a heightened evidentiary standard based on their majority-group status.

On April 23, 2025, the Administration issued a new Executive Order entitled "Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy" along with an accompanying fact sheet. The Executive Order shifts how the federal government approaches civil rights enforcement and how it will analyze allegations of discrimination.

On February 19, 2025, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas vowed to prioritize anti-American national origin discrimination in compliance efforts, investigations, and litigation.