Category: Daily News

On April 29, 2024, the EEOC published its Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace – the first update to the agency’s harassment guidance since 1999. The guidance replaced five prior guidance documents issued between 1987 and 1999 and was approved by a partisan 3-2 vote. The guidance was a sweeping, roughly 90-page document that addressed harassment across every protected characteristic under federal EEO law.

The next year, on January 28, 2025, EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas rolled back much of the EEOC’s Biden-era guidance related to gender identity discrimination and harassment, aligning with President Trump’s Executive Order 14168 signed on Inauguration Day. However, Lucas could not formally rescind guidance that had been previously approved by a majority vote of the Commission, and she was limited to removing certain materials from the EEOC’s internal and external websites and other public documents. At that time, the EEOC lacked a quorum, so a formal rescission vote was not possible.

Along the way, the State of Texas and the Heritage Foundation sued to enjoin the guidance, arguing it was contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, and in excess of the EEOC’s statutory rulemaking authority. In the case of Texas v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 2:24-CV-173 (N.D. Tex. May 15, 2025) a federal district court in Texas agreed, and struck down portions of the 2024 guidance addressing bathroom, dress, and pronoun accommodations, finding the EEOC had exceeded its statutory authority by expanding the definition of “sex” beyond the biological binary.

Following up on the announced Andrea Lucas roll back, on January 22, 2026, the EEOC officially voted 2-1 along party lines to formally rescind its 2024 Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace in its entirety. Chair Lucas and Commissioner Brittany Panuccio (confirmed in October 2025, restoring the quorum) voted for rescission, while Democratic Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal dissented.

It had been anticipated that the EEOC might limit the rescission to portions addressing sexual orientation and transgender status, but the Commission voted to rescind the guidance in its entirety – including sections on race, color, pregnancy, disability, and other protected categories that were largely uncontroversial. Some employment law commentators have theorized that the Trump EEOC chose a complete rescission because it would be easier than making piecemeal edits, and that any replacement guidance might emphasize religious-based harassment and so-called “reverse” harassment.

The rescission does not amend Title VII itself or overturn existing Supreme Court precedent, including the Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, 590 U.S. 644 (2020) decision holding that Title VII prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The guidance was nonbinding and provided stakeholders with information on how the EEOC planned to enforce the law – it did not change employers’ underlying legal obligations. Employees can still pursue harassment claims, courts interpret the law independently, and state and local anti-discrimination laws remain unaffected.

California’s primary anti-discrimination and anti-harassment statute is the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), codified at Government Code § 12900 et seq. FEHA is one of the most expansive employment civil rights laws in the nation, and it operates entirely independently of the EEOC’s guidance. The EEOC’s rescission does not alter any California employer’s obligations under FEHA.

FEHA does not rely on judicial interpretation to extend protections to gender identity and sexual orientation – they are expressly listed in the statute. California law prohibits workplace discrimination and harassment based on gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, sex/gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and related medical conditions), reproductive health decisionmaking, race (including traits associated with race, such as hair texture and hairstyle), religion (including religious dress and grooming practices), national origin, age, disability, medical condition, genetic information, military or veteran status, and other protected characteristics.

The consensus among employment law practitioners is that while the federal enforcement landscape has shifted significantly, employers should not treat the rescission as a green light to relax their anti-harassment programs.

The rescission has prompted federal lawmakers to introduce legislation – such as the BE HEARD Act of 2026 – that would amend Title VII to expressly include sexual orientation, gender identity, sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, and pregnancy in the definition of sex.

In practical terms, employment lawyers advising California employers are counseling them to maintain their existing anti-harassment policies, training programs, and complaint procedures without any weakening in response to the EEOC’s action – because California law independently requires everything the EEOC guidance recommended and more.

Jazmin Ayala-Ventura worked as a janitor for CCS Facility Services–Fresno Inc., a commercial janitorial company, from June 2021 to March 2022.

When she was hired, CCS emailed her links to an online onboarding system where she reviewed and electronically signed several company policies, including a five-page “Mutual Agreement to Arbitrate.” The system required employees to scroll through each document before they could click “yes” to agree, and offered the option to view the agreement in English or Spanish. The agreement covered “all claims, disputes, and/or controversies … whether or not arising out of Employee’s employment or the termination of employment,” contained a class action waiver, survived termination of employment, and could only be revoked by a writing signed by both the employee and a CCS human resources representative. CCS agreed to bear all arbitration costs except each party’s own legal fees.

In August 2024, Ayala-Ventura filed a putative class action against CCS alleging a battery of wage-and-hour violations under the California Labor Code – including unpaid wages, missed meal and rest breaks, failure to reimburse expenses, and unfair business practices under Business and Professions Code section 17200.

CCS moved to compel individual arbitration and dismiss the class claims. Ayala-Ventura opposed, arguing the agreement was both procedurally and substantively unconscionable – specifically that its scope was overbroad, it lacked mutuality, and it was indefinite in duration. She relied heavily on Cook v. University of Southern California (2024) 102 Cal.App.5th 312, a Second District opinion that struck down a similar-looking arbitration agreement with USC.

The Fresno County Superior Court granted CCS’s motion. The court found procedural unconscionability was minimal, distinguished Cook on the facts, and concluded the agreement was not substantively unconscionable. It ordered arbitration of Ayala-Ventura’s individual claims, dismissed the class claims, and stayed the case pending arbitration.

Because an order compelling arbitration is generally not directly appealable, the Fifth District Court of Appeal treated the appeal as a petition for writ of mandate and denied the petition on the merits in the published case of Ayala-Ventura v. Superior Court –F089695 (March 2024).

On procedural unconscionability, the court agreed with the trial court that the degree was minimal. The agreement was adhesive in form, and an employee might reasonably fear losing a job offer by declining it. But the agreement was a clearly labeled standalone document (not a buried clause), was available in two languages, used legible formatting, and there was no evidence of deception or time pressure.

On substantive unconscionability, the court addressed each of Ayala-Ventura’s arguments. First, on overbreadth, the court acknowledged the agreement’s language could be read to reach claims unrelated to employment, but applied Civil Code section 1643 to construe the ambiguity in a way that rendered the agreement lawful – limiting it to employment-related claims. Even under Ayala-Ventura’s broader reading, the court found the agreement distinguishable from Cook because CCS is a janitorial services company, not a sprawling university with hospitals and stadiums, making the prospect of wide-ranging non-employment claims far less realistic.

Second, on duration, the court found that the agreement’s survival clause was not unconscionable in context, again because CCS’s limited operations made the concern about perpetual exposure largely speculative.

Third, on mutuality, the court found the agreement sufficiently bilateral: unlike the Cook agreement, CCS’s version expressly bound the company’s related entities and limited claims against employees and agents to acts taken in their capacity as such. Both employer and employee were subject to arbitration on equivalent terms.

Finally, the court addressed stare decisis. It clarified that all published Court of Appeal decisions bind all superior courts statewide – the trial court was wrong to suggest Cook was not binding simply because the Fifth District had not yet cited it. However, the court confirmed that trial courts may fairly distinguish binding precedent on the facts, and the Fifth District itself found Cook factually distinguishable for the reasons discussed above.

Epic Systems Corporation is a major American health information technology company. It develops electronic health records (EHR) software – the systems hospitals and clinics use to store and manage patient medical records. They are the dominant EHR vendor in the United States. Over 1,900 hospitals and 49,000 clinics use Epic’s EHR software. Their Care Everywhere interoperability tool exchanges over 20 million patient records daily.

On January 13, 2026, Epic Systems Corporation and four healthcare system co-plaintiffs (OCHIN, Reid Health, Trinity Health, and UMass Memorial Health) filed a landmark lawsuit in the Central District of California targeting an alleged syndicate of companies that fraudulently extracted hundreds of thousands of patient medical records from national health data exchange networks – not to treat patients, but to allegedly sell those records to mass tort law firms.

The defendants allegedly gained access to the Carequality and TEFCA interoperability frameworks – systems that collectively facilitate over one billion patient record exchanges monthly – by falsely claiming to be healthcare providers retrieving records for treatment purposes. In reality, according to the complaint, the records were being harvested and sold to plaintiff attorneys for use in identifying and recruiting clients for mass tort lawsuits, including PFAS “forever chemical” litigation and other class actions.

No law firms are named as defendants – the complaint stops at the companies allegdly selling records to attorneys (LlamaLab, Hoppr, NHPC), not the firms buying them. However, the complaint is unusually detailed about the commercial relationship: LlamaLab advertised at Mass Torts Made Perfect, Hoppr pitched personal injury attorneys directly, and the Integritort predecessor was caught on video demonstrating live record retrieval to a “law firm lead generation business.”

The complaint is unusually explicit about the role of plaintiff-side attorneys as the downstream buyers of these records. Key details include:

– – LlamaLab, Inc. (New York): Described in the complaint as offering “Same-Day Medical Records Retrieval for Law Firms” and “medical-grade AI analysis tools.” LlamaLab sponsored the October 2025 Mass Torts Made Perfect conference, a major national plaintiff attorney gathering, and exhibited in the medical records category. Its CEO, Shere Saidon, presented its services to class action attorneys at that conference.
– – Hoppr, LLC (Dallas, TX): Founded by Meredith Manak, also the CEO of defendant Unit 387 LLC. Hoppr’s stated business is to “instantly aggregate all patient records” for law firms and insurance companies. Manak gave a September 2025 presentation to personal injury attorneys titled “How to Request and Receive All of Your Client’s Medical Records In Less Than 48 Hours for 1 Low Flat Fee.”
– – PFAS Litigation Targeting: Records returned by RavillaMed to healthcare providers contained no actual treatment information, but instead reorganized existing diagnoses to highlight PFAS (forever chemical) exposure associations — a subject heavily litigated in mass tort court.
– – Nationwide Healthcare Provider Corp (NHPC): Defendant Ryan Hilton of the Mammoth entity group is listed as the NPI owner of NHPC, which markets patient record access directly to attorneys. NHPC’s promotional materials boasted it could pull records “straight from providers’ EHRs” to “representative firms” in “minutes, not weeks.”

On March 13, 2026, plaintiffs and defendant Critical Care Nurse Consultants LLC d/b/a GuardDog Telehealth entered a Stipulated Judgment and Permanent Injunction, the first resolution in the case. Paragraph 5 of that document reads “GuardDog admits that, since it began operating as a company in 2024, its goal was to provide chronic care management (“CCM”) and remote patient monitoring (“RPM”) for patients, but that did not happen. For the duration of its existence, its business instead focused on requesting, reviewing, and summarizing medical records, and providing those medical records to law firms. GuardDog further admits that its predecessor, Critical Care Nurse Consulting LLC (“CCNC”), provided similar services and medical records to law firms between 2022 and 2024;”

This lawsuit represents the first major litigation challenge to what plaintiffs characterize as an organized “Hydra” of entities exploiting health data infrastructure for plaintiff recruitment. Plaintiffs allege that “When caught, rather than stopping their activity, the bad entity owners, operators, and those in their inner circles simply create new companies. The scheme thus operates like a Hydra: when one fraudulent entity is exposed, the bad actors birth a new one. As an example, when concerns were raised to Health Gorilla about one of their connections, an entity called Critical Care Nurse Consulting, over its affiliation with law firms, it abruptly stopped taking patient records via Carequality in September 2024. That very same month, a related organization previously onboarded by Health Gorilla, Defendant SelfRx, began taking large volumes of patient records. Both Critical Care Nurse Consulting and SelfRx are customers of Defendant Unit 387, an intermediary health data broker onboarded by Health Gorilla.”

The case is ongoing. A scheduling conference is set for April 23, 2026, and several defendants (e.g., the Mammoth group) have filed or are briefing motions to dismiss.

Roy Payan and Portia Mason are blind individuals who enrolled as students at Los Angeles City College, a campus of the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), in 2015. Both registered with the college’s Office of Special Services and were approved for accommodations – including recorded lectures, preferential seating, access to electronic text materials, and test-taking accommodations – beginning in the Spring 2016 semester. Both students relied on JAWS screen-reading software to access electronic text.

Despite their approved accommodations, Payan and Mason encountered pervasive accessibility barriers. Payan received textbook chapters only after they had already been covered in class. Classroom software platforms such as MyMathLab and Etudes were inaccessible, forcing Payan to complete homework through limited tutoring sessions rather than independently like his peers. Library databases, campus computers, and the LACCD and LACC websites were also inaccessible, hampering his ability to register for courses, apply for financial aid, or stay informed about campus life. Both students had difficulty securing test-taking accommodations, and their accommodation letters were provided only in inaccessible print format. Payan was also steered away from a single-semester math course and directed into a slower two-semester sequence because of his disability.

The plaintiffs – joined by the National Federation of the Blind and its California chapter – sued LACCD under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in March 2017.

After the first trial in 2019, the jury awarded $40,000 to Payan and $0 to Mason. All parties appealed, and the Ninth Circuit vacated and remanded in Payan v. Los Angeles Community College District, 11 F.4th 729 (9th Cir. 2021). On retrial, the jury found LACCD liable on fourteen of nineteen factual allegations and determined that LACCD had intentionally violated Title II on nine of them. The jury awarded $218,500 plus attorney’s fees to Payan and $24,000 plus attorney’s fees to Mason.

LACCD then moved for remittitur. Relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C., 596 U.S. 212 (2022) – which held that emotional distress damages are not recoverable under Spending Clause antidiscrimination statutes – the district court granted the motion and slashed the awards to $1,650 for Payan and $0 for Mason. The court reasoned that the jury’s verdicts could only be attributed to either emotional distress damages or lost educational opportunities, both of which the court deemed impermissible.

The Ninth Circuit reversed and vacated the remittitur, remanding with instructions to reinstate the original jury awards of $218,500 to Payan and $24,000 to Mason in the published case of Payan v. Los Angeles Community College District, No. 24-1809 (9th Cir. Mar. 11, 2026)

The panel addressed three issues. First, it found no forfeiture, concluding that LACCD was not barred from challenging emotional distress damages on remand because the issue had not been decided in the prior appeal.

Second, the panel agreed with the district court that emotional distress damages are unavailable under Title II of the ADA. Although Title II was enacted under the Fourteenth Amendment and Commerce Clause rather than the Spending Clause, its statutory text defines its remedies as those of the Rehabilitation Act, which in turn incorporates Title VI’s remedial framework. Under Cummings, 596 U.S. at 221–22, and Barnes v. Gorman, 536 U.S. 181, 189–90 (2002), this chain of statutory incorporation means Title II’s remedies are coextensive with those available under contract-law principles – and emotional distress damages are generally not compensable in contract.

Third – and critically – the panel held that the district court erred by failing to recognize that the jury’s award could reflect compensatory damages for lost educational opportunities, a form of relief that remains available after Cummings. Agreeing with the Eleventh Circuit’s reasoning in A.W. by & Through J.W. v. Coweta County School District, 110 F.4th 1309, 1315–16 (11th Cir. 2024), the court held that plaintiffs who prove intentional discrimination may recover compensation for the educational benefits they were denied. Because the trial evidence showed that Payan and Mason were effectively barred from meaningful participation in their courses, and because the jury instructions allowed compensation for “any injury” caused by LACCD’s violations, the jury’s award was consistent with the record. The district court abused its discretion by granting remittitur without considering this legally viable basis for the damages.

Judge Lee dissented in part. He agreed that emotional distress damages are barred and that lost-opportunity damages remain available in theory, but he concluded that the plaintiffs failed to present sufficient concrete evidence of lost educational opportunities to justify awards exceeding $200,000. In his view, the testimony amounted to generalized descriptions of diminished educational experiences rather than quantifiable economic losses, and the district court’s remittitur should have been affirmed.

Brothers and tow company owners, Mark Hassan, 46, of Corona Del Mar, and Ahmed Hassan, 35 of Walnut, were arrested on multiple counts of felony insurance fraud after allegedly underreporting employee payroll and paying portions of employees’ wages in cash to defraud workers’ compensation insurance companies out of nearly 6 million dollars of insurance premiums.

The California Department of Insurance launched an investigation after receiving two fraud referrals from an insurance company alleging that Mark Hassan, owner of Hadley Tow, underreported his company’s payroll.  The Department’s investigation expanded when it received a third fraud referral alleging his brother Ahmed Hassan, owner of California Heights Tow, filed a fraudulent employee injury claim against his insurance policy for a Hadley Tow employee.

Mark Hassen, also the owner of FMG Inc., was doing business as Hadley Tow based in Whittier, Courtesy Tow based in Sylmar, Crescenta Valley Tow based in La Crescenta, California Coach Towing based in Walnut, and several other tow companies across the greater Los Angeles area. He also held towing contracts with multiple law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California.  

During the investigation, detectives learned Mark Hassan used his uninsured tow company, Courtesy Tow, as a “shell company” to conceal portions of Hadley Tow employee payroll to allegedly defraud workers’ compensation carriers of premiums they were owed. Ahmed Hassan, in an attempt to lower his company’s workers’ compensation insurance premiums also underreported employee wages.

In addition to hiding and misrepresenting employee wages to their workers’ compensation insurance providers, the Hassan brothers paid portions or all of employee wages without withholding standard deductions, which led to Employment Development Department opening a payroll tax evasion investigation.

For both Hadley Tow and California Heights Tow the brothers reported a combined payroll of $3,038,164 to their insurance carriers, but a forensic audit revealed the actual combined payroll for the two companies was $16,716,657. The illegal actions resulted in an estimated premium loss of $5,897,487.

Underreporting of workers’ compensation insurance in California is illegal and undermines the financial stability of the insurance system, which shifts costs onto other policyholders. It also jeopardizes the availability of benefits for injured workers, hindering their access to necessary support. Unfair competition also arises as fraudulent businesses gain an advantage over ethical ones. Experts at the Department of Insurance are dedicated to protecting consumers by rigorously investigating cases of alleged illegal acts by insurance companies and individuals.

Mark Hassan was booked at the Los Angeles County Sheriff – Inmate Reception Center, and Ahmed Hassan was booked at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga. This case is being prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office.