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.

In the case of Tarquinio v. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (No. 24-1432), decided by the Fourth Circuit on June 25, 2025, the court addressed whether an employer had a duty under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to accommodate an employee who refused to provide medical documentation supporting her request for a COVID-19 vaccine exemption.

In Stanley v. City of Sanford, Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court held a disabled former employee who neither “holds” nor “desires” a job is not a “qualified individual” under the ADA and, thus, cannot sue for disability discrimination following her employer’s revocation of retiree health benefits. 

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.