Question: It’s natural to get mad when one your employees files a legal complaint or lawsuit. Getting mad is fine … getting even isn’t. But “getting even” seems to be a popular pastime in American businesses today. That’s why claims of retaliation are the fastest-growing form of illegal discrimination claimed by U.S. employees.

Try this on for gross. A female employee gains access to her boss’s e-mail account without permission and discovers a vulgar e-mail sent by a male co-worker to her male boss. The subject of the e-mail: her genitals. So, does this create an illegal hostile work environment, even though the e-mail was not sent to the woman and she was never intended to read it?

When you have to perform reductions in force, the best strategy for avoiding age-discrimination lawsuits has nothing to do with a “strategy” at all—it’s all about making sound decisions based on honest, documented employee rankings, as telecom giant Sprint Nextel has just learned the hard way.

In the good old days, employers used to have control over who they hired. Not anymore. Today, the EEOC has the power to decide who you will have to roll out the red carpet for.

How would supervisors in your organization handle this situation: A female employee walks into her boss’s office and complains that one of her co-workers showed her pictures of himself engaged in ... activity best reserved for the privacy of one’s own home (get the gist?). Pretty serious stuff. Apparently one guy didn’t think so ...

You’d think that going into a retail store to pay retail prices with real green money would be a sight for a salesperson’s sore eyes. Not the case at Dillard’s Department Store in Kansas City, which is now facing a messy lawsuit because of one saleswoman’s rudeness.

Ouch for Employers! The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Chair Naomi Earp has just said that EEOC attorneys now work as if they are part of a national law firm. Instead of simply handling a complaint in the geographic region it was filed in, this new model allows EEOC attorneys to strategically scrutinize the employment practices of big companies with multiple sites nationwide and to effectively select the best venue to litigate in.

Does your “Now Hiring” sign really mean “Now Hiring Men”? That appeared to be the case at an Ohio auto dealership, which just settled a sex-discrimination lawsuit with the EEOC. The dealership must pay out $2.3 million to a group of 39 female applicants who were denied sales jobs.

FedEx will write a check for $55 million dollars to settle a class-action suit alleging race and national-origin discrimination in hiring, promotions and performance practices. FedEx’s “pay day” comes after minority employees challenged the company’s “Basic Skills Test” hiring and promotion tool for having a discriminatory impact on them ...

Do you have to tell your customers you are sexual harassers? Yup, you might have to. Shocking, right? In a startling court order, a judge required a company to inform their customers about their sexual harassment verdict against them for over $1 million ...

“Tr*mp.” “F*ck.” “Sl*t.” “B*tch.” “B*be.” That was the everyday vocabulary for one of the bosses at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama. Sounds like a real loser, right? Not in this case. The official loser was the employee who failed to report the manager’s conduct promtly and, therefore, lost her case in court ...

Question: Open mouth. Insert foot. Taste a lawsuit? The district manager at the Foot Locker did. In a surprising court ruling, a judge decided that only “one comment” made by the district manager about the store manager’s age was enough to hand him his walking papers -- into court that is.

Question: How would you like to work for this guy? ’Joe’ allegedly simulated acts of masturbation and went around sticking his finger in employees’ ears. He also engaged in unwanted touching, sexual jokes and offensive remarks about employees’ bodies. He went so far as to share intimate details about sex with his wife. One employee claims he kissed her on the lips and offered her a promotion in exchange for sex. Those employee, of course, sued for sexual harassment. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Not so ...

Why does testing bring about that sledgehammer-in-the-stomach feeling? Maybe because, as students, we never knew quite what to expect. Now, the same is true when it comes to a recent trend in employment-law cases: applicants and employees making phone calls to secretly test whether your organization is discriminating. While the U.S. Supreme Court has long acknowledged the importance and legality of such testers in civil-rights claims, two new court cases offer critical lessons for employers ...