Why Does This Case Matter?

Discrimination law was built around the idea that a person makes the hiring decision. This case asks what happens when the decision is actually made by software - built by a company the applicant never even applied to.

It's testing whether the software company itself can be sued, not just the employer

On July 12, 2024, the judge ruled that Workday - the company that built the screening software - could potentially be held responsible for discrimination, not just the employers who use its product. Federal discrimination laws apply to "employers," and courts have said that can include a company acting as the employer's stand-in for hiring decisions. The judge found that Mobley had made a strong enough case that Workday's customers "delegate traditional hiring functions, including rejecting applicants, to the algorithmic decision-making tools provided by Workday," and that Workday's software "is not simply implementing in a rote way the criteria that employers set forth, but is instead participating in the decision-making process by recommending some candidates to move forward and rejecting others." (source: court order, page 4, quoting an earlier ruling; source: Epstein Becker Green law firm analysis)

Before this ruling, discrimination lawsuits over hiring software mostly asked one question: did the employer using the tool do something wrong? This case opened up a second target - the company that built the tool in the first place.

The U.S. government's own civil rights watchdog got involved

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) - the federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination law - filed a brief in this case on April 9, 2024, offering its legal views to the court even though it isn't suing anyone itself. The EEOC doesn't weigh in on ordinary employment disputes, so its involvement here signals that the agency sees this case as bigger than the two companies involved - it could shape how discrimination law applies to AI hiring tools everywhere. (source: U.S. EEOC's own website)

It's unusually big for a case about AI and hiring

On May 16, 2025, the court allowed the age-discrimination part of the case to grow into a nationwide group that other people could join - anyone 40 or older who applied through Workday's system since September 24, 2020 and got rejected. About 14,000 people signed up before the March 7, 2026 deadline. That turns what started as one person's complaint into one of the largest lawsuits ever filed over AI hiring discrimination. (source: court order; source: HR Dive)

It's deciding how much companies have to reveal about their own AI testing

In May 2026, a judge ruled that Workday did not have to hand over its own internal testing on whether its AI hiring tools were biased, because the testing had been done together with Workday's lawyers as part of getting legal advice - which the law generally protects from being shared with the other side. This matters well beyond this one case: it's an early answer to a question that will come up in almost every future AI-discrimination lawsuit - can a company shield its own bias testing from scrutiny simply by having its lawyers involved in it? (source: Duane Morris law firm analysis)

To see how these rulings unfolded over time, check the full case timeline.