Claims that a group of securities underwriters were negligent in a senior health care company’s initial public offering have been kept alive by a Colorado federal judge.

Separate claims that J.P. Morgan Securities lied and misled investors also survived a motion to dismiss Thursday, but U.S. District Judge William J. Martinez tossed similar claims against the other underwriters, which include Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Capital One, without prejudice.

The proposed class action is being brought by public service pension funds in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas, and in Indiana on behalf of anyone who bought shares of InnovAge, an elder care delivery company, between the company’s IPO on March 4, 2021, and December 22, 2001.

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The plaintiffs are represented by Julie G. Reiser, S. Douglas Bunch, Jan E. Messerschmidt, Carol V. Gilden and Manuel J. Dominguez of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, as well as Jason B. Robinson and Cecil E. Morris of Fairfield & Woods PC.

Hormel Foods Corp. and two meat processing plants have agreed to a $13.5 million settlement in a Colorado wage-fixing suit, joining a host of companies that have reached deals to end claims that they colluded to depress wages.

In a joint notice of settlement filed Wednesday in Colorado federal court, attorneys for plant workers said the forthcoming agreement would resolve all claims against Hormel; one of its Illinois-based facilities, Rochelle Foods LLC; and a Minnesota-based processing plant, Quality Pork Processors Inc.

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The proposed class is represented by Shana E. Scarlett, Rio S. Pierce, Abby R. Wolf, Steve W. Berman, Elaine T. Byszewski and Abigail D. Pershing of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, George F. Farah, Rebecca P. Chang, Nicholas J. Jackson, Martha E. Guarnieri and William H. Anderson of Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC, Brent W. Johnson, Benjamin D. Brown, Robert A. Braun, Alison S. Deich, Zachary R. Glubiak, Zachary I. Krowitz, Daniel H. Silverman and Nina Jaffe-Geffner of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Brian D. Clark, Stephen J. Teti, Arielle S. Wagner and Eura Chang of Lockridge Grindal Nauen PLLP, and Candice J. Enders and Julia R. McGrath of Berger Montague PC.

Customs and Border Protection’s settlement addresses pregnancy discrimination, policy changes and training for managers that could improve the agency’s culture.

Under an image of the Statue of Liberty, set against a waving American flag, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) website describes the agency’s commitment to “nondiscrimination in the workforce.”

CBP’s self-praise includes its dedication “to preserving individual liberty, fairness and equality under the law.”

But those notions of nondiscrimination and fairness took a big hit last week with a tentative Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) legal settlement that would award $45 million to CBP employees who were discriminated against because of their pregnancies. Rather than affirming federal law, the case points to the agency’s violation of the law, specifically the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

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“I don’t think there was anything malicious about this,” Joseph Sellers, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, said of the discrimination during a telephone interview. His firm and Gilbert Employment Law represented a group of more than 1,000 women who work at CBP, who will receive between about $7,000 and $100,000 each, depending on individual circumstances. Included in the $45 million for CBP employees is $9 million in attorneys’ fees.

If maliciousness didn’t play a role, there was “probably a paternalistic view about pregnancy,” he added, among supervisors who doubted the ability of pregnant employees to do the job or the safety of the fetuses when those employees were on their regular assignments.

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Certainly, there are situations that could be especially hazardous for pregnant officers, such as chasing suspects. But when agency witnesses were asked what percentage of the time those situations occur, Sellers said, “they described it as a very, very small.” Furthermore, the officers work in teams, so during the few times a CBP operation could be hazardous for a pregnant officer, a colleague could take the needed action.

A proposed class of car buyers is urging a Michigan federal court not to dismiss their suit claiming General Motors sold vehicles with defective transmissions, saying the automaker hid the defect, so they couldn’t have discovered it until recently.

In a brief filed Tuesday, the buyers, led by Cole Ulrich, said General Motors LLC affirmatively hid the problems with its eight-speed transmission by publishing “evolving” technical service bulletins instructing its repair shops to tell car owners that the symptoms of the defect were “normal” or to do ineffectual repairs.

Ulrich argued that these tactics delayed the discovery of the defect despite their due diligence, as the representations made by repair technicians obfuscated their existence so that GM could induce them not to pursue claims.

Because the repairs did not address the defects or tell the plaintiffs that there was in fact a defect, GM cannot argue now that the claims came too late, according to the brief. The plaintiffs further argue that GM knew that one of the defects, described as “harsh shift,” could not be fixed. It began redesigning the transmission entirely to address it but still hid its existence and told its technicians to do nothing about it, they said.

The plaintiffs further argued that no information was publicly disclosed about the redesign until 2023, and no information about attempts to correct defective transmission fluid was disclosed until 2019, after their purchases.

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Theodore Leopold of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, representing the plaintiffs, said Wednesday, “We believe the facts and law support that the Court deny the motion to dismiss as it did with the other 26 states previously, and that these customers get a chance to certify their claims as a class.”

For the 6th time, Cohen Milstein has ranked among the “Ceiling Smashers” in the Law360 Pulse Women in Law Report. Ranking among the top 3 firms with 101-250 attorneys, Cohen Milstein is recognized as a firm with the most female attorneys in the equity partnership.

According to Law360 Pulse’s 2024 Women In Law Report, although women make up around 41% of all lawyers, they hold just over a quarter of equity partner positions across the industry. Again, this year’s ranking uses a pipeline score methodology with benchmarks to indicate whether firms are keeping pace with the talent pipeline in hiring, promoting and retaining female attorneys.

Despite the broader industry challenges, the firms that made it onto Law360 Pulse’s Ceiling Smashers list are demonstrating that strides towards gender parity in the upper ranks are possible.

See more about the Glass Ceiling Report.

The opacity of workplace artificial intelligence tools poses a daunting challenge for plaintiff-side employment lawyers who think that technology causes discriminatory results.

Though the inner workings of AI systems remain difficult to access, lawyers say they’re bringing discrimination charges based on publicly available information. They’re suing the vendors of the tools directly, rather than the employers that use them, and they’re applying existing law in new ways.

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Christine Webber, co-chair of Cohen Milstein’s civil rights and employment practice, also said she’d prefer to sue vendors directly — she framed it as going straight to the source of the discrimination.

“My goal has always been to go after the vendors first. Here’s my theory why. Because any given vendor has dozens, hundreds of customers,” she said. “Let me sue the vendor once and deal with all of it instead of having to sue 100 different employers to accomplish the same thing.”

Another benefit of suing vendors directly is that it could help boost plaintiffs’ access to information that might otherwise be sealed off, Webber pointed out.

In the Workday case, because Workday is a direct defendant and the judge has found they can be held liable under the law, Workday may have a harder time keeping the details of its algorithms under seal by claiming they’re trade secrets.

“It’s going to be a lot harder for them to say, ‘Oh, trade secret, we shouldn’t have to disclose it,'” so as not to be at a disadvantage to competitors, she said. “Obviously, the plaintiffs in the case are not a competitor. I don’t really see what the basis would be for denying that sort of discovery.”

Shout-out to lawyers at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Gilbert Employment Law who secured a $45 million settlement from Customs and Border Protection on behalf of 1,000 employees who claimed the agency discriminated against pregnant workers. Plaintiffs initially filed the lawsuit in 2016 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They claimed CBP forced pregnant employees onto light duty, which often included worse schedules and no overtime. The class is represented by Joseph Sellers, Phoebe Wolfe, Harini Srinivasan and Megan Reif of Cohen Milstein and Gary Gilbert, Shannon Leary, Cori Cohen and Rachel Petro of Gilbert Employment Law.

The growing use of artificial intelligence in hiring and other workplace decisions has the plaintiffs bar playing catch-up, trying to figure out how and when AI is being used.

Employers aren’t often obligated to disclose when they’re using AI to evaluate applicants, and even if they are, the tools themselves are a so-called black box. That opacity has so far put the worker side at a big disadvantage, lawyers and employee advocates told Law360.

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For now, applicants must do some of the work themselves. Once they know they’ve been assessed by an AI tool and turned down, said Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC partner Christine Webber, an enterprising applicant could start “looking at the pattern of decisions … who has been hired, and come to a reasonable conclusion that this seems to be having an adverse impact.” Webber co-chairs the plaintiff-side firm’s civil rights and employment practice.

Yoshihara added that many employers are not “doing what they should be doing in terms of testing” AI tools for biased impacts before deploying them.

But the Mobley case may prove key, Scherer said. If Workday can’t prove it tested the tool and found it fair, “I don’t see how Workday avoids letting them get under the hood to see what data was used to develop and train it, because that might shed light on whether there actually was a possibility that it had a disparate impact,” Scherer said.

Webber has brought disparate impact cases in the housing sphere, where housing providers that use information from consumer reporting agencies are required to tell rejected applicants that they were turned away based on that information.

She said some of the information she would want in order to build an employment case includes programming instructions, the data the tool was trained on and whether that data changed over time, and whether the tool used only machine learning or if a human was involved.

Webber would also be looking to see what parameters were used as controls for the tool, what kinds of feedback the tool received from humans during its development, how it was tested and how it performed on those tests. She’s watching closely to see what comes out of the discovery process in the Mobley case.

“Thinking through what’s the best regulation of these types of tools — which a lot of states are looking at — where are the risk factors, what are the things we need to worry about?” Webber said. “Having the chance to really get your hands in the guts of it and do a little dissection and learn how it works I just think would be interesting.”

The agency responsible for securing the country’s land and air border crossings is settling a case that alleged the agency discriminated against pregnant employees, lawyers for the employees said Tuesday.

In a news release, lawyers for Customs and Border Protection employees said they had reached a $45 million settlement in the class action that includes nearly 1,100 women. The lawyers said the settlement also includes an agreement by the agency to enact reforms to address the discriminatory practices.

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Gary Gilbert, President of Gilbert Employment Law, and Joseph Sellers, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, who represent the employees said there will now be a presumption that pregnant employees can do their jobs, instead of being sidelined to light duty.

The agency will have to make reasonable accommodations for them such as making sure there are uniforms available for pregnant women, the lawyers said. There will also be trainings on how the light duty policy should be implemented and a three-year period of enforcement during which the lawyers can go back to the EEOC if they hear from clients that problems are persisting.

Under a $45 million settlement, Customs and Border Protection agreed to adjust a practice that some employees say has instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation.

When Roberta Gabaldon was ready to share news of her pregnancy with her colleagues at Customs and Border Protection in 2015, she brought in pink and blue doughnuts with a sign that read: “Pink and blue. Pink and blue. Somebody’s pregnant, guess who?”

But her palpable excitement, particularly after a miscarriage months earlier, quickly dissipated.

“My boss came into my office and he’s like: ‘You have to leave. You have to get a note about your pregnancy, and you have to go on light duty,’” Ms. Gabaldon, an agriculture specialist in the El Paso office, recalled, describing how she was told she needed to be reassigned to a post with fewer responsibilities regardless of whether she or her doctor believed it was necessary.

Her experience reflects that of hundreds of female employees at the agency who have filed suit against Customs and Border Protection, saying that since at least 2016, they were denied equal treatment once they disclosed they were expecting. No matter the physical demands of their jobs, many were transferred to another post, typically centered on administrative or secretarial work and usually unrelated to what skills they had developed in their existing roles. The policy, they say, hurt their opportunities for advancement, and others add that they weathered pay cuts because light duty meant no more overtime.

But under a $45 million settlement reached on Monday, Customs and Border Protection agreed to adjust a practice that some employees say has instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation as women try to hide their pregnancies at work for as long as possible.

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A lawyer who represented Ms. Gabaldon, Joseph M. Sellers, a partner with the Washington-based firm Cohen Milstein, said women shared remarkably similar accounts of how the agency displayed a persistent skepticism toward the ability of pregnant officers to do their jobs.

“We want pregnant employees to be in our work force in this country,” Mr. Sellers said. “We ought to create the work environment and expectations to ensure that will happen.”

Mr. Sellers, along with the law firm Gilbert Employment Law, interviewed about half of the plaintiffs. Some 90 percent of the women who joined the lawsuit still work at C.B.P.