Inside the SHRM lawsuit: A ‘messy employment discrimination case’ that ended with an $11.5m judgment

After a Colorado jury awarded $11.5 million to Rehab Mohamed, a former employee of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world’s largest HR organization helped shape one of the year’s biggest HR stories (sorry, Coldplay), and probably in a way that wasn’t on anyone’s 2025 bingo card.

A jury found SHRM liable of racial discrimination and retaliation on Dec. 5 and awarded Mohamed $1.5 million in compensatory damages and an additional $10 million in punitive damages.

ICYMI: According to the June 2022 lawsuit against SHRM, Mohamed said she was fired from her role as a senior instructional designer (a role she was promoted to months before her termination) shortly after making a racial-discrimination complaint to a skip-level supervisor, HR Brew previously reported.

At issue in the suit were Mohamed’s performance and performance ratings, disparate treatment between white and non-white colleagues, how and when SHRM conducts HR investigations, and progressive discipline and the potential of a pretexual termination.

We called HR Bestie Ashley Herd, who runs a manager training and consulting firm, Manager Method, and has served as in-house counsel and HR leadership roles throughout her career, including one year at McKinsey & Co. Herd has had no direct involvement with the case but she and her cohosts on the HR Besties podcast followed the case this year with some gusto.

Herd told HR Brew that some actions taken by SHRM leaders appeared to stray from HR industry norms and best practices. SHRM regularly produces how-to guides, articles, and worksheets highlighting these norms and best practices for the broader HR community.

In his first media interview following the Dec. 5 judgment, SHRM CEO Johnny C. Taylor told HR Brew, “Our North Star is to be the trusted source and resource for all things work…We invest so much in our thought leadership and our research, following the data to make decisions and to suggest and recommend what the best practice is.”

Performance. Herd told HR Brew glowing performance reviews followed by a termination was the “No. 1 trap” that she saw lead to employment litigation when she worked as an attorney.

“In performance management, generally, it’s super important to make sure you can stand behind everything you say,” she said.

Mohamed’s previous performance reviews were described as “glowing” and “stellar” in her initial June filing—which Herd called “objectively positive.” In an April 2023 deposition, Mohamed was asked about references in her performance review referring to balancing her work against timelines for improved efficiency. Mohamed testified she was told leaders were instructed to include critical feedback even if none existed.

If organizations value both critical and positive feedback in the performance management process and a manager is drawing a blank on the former, rather than adding criticism to check the box, Herd recommended organizations instruct managers to consult HR.

“The second a manager tells an employee, ‘Oh, HR told me I had to put something [negative],’ it completely devalues the whole performance management process, and especially a performance review process,” she said, “It feels super unfair.”

In fact, SHRM’s performance management toolkit recommends a “well-prepared” HR team lead performance-management processes to ensure they add business value and don’t run afoul of the law. An article published on SHRM’s website in 2022 highlighting performance review best practices reminds HR pros that feedback should be “specific and descriptive,” highlighting critical incidents during the performance period and impacts to the business.

Taylor said managers need to have honest conversations in these settings. While looking backward at a previous performance period can be useful, performance assessments and appraisals are best looking forward. Yes, include the past, Taylor said, but also identify opportunities for employees to demonstrate they’re improving and growing.

“We’ve got to do intense training. A learning for me is, and this is true of every company I’ve been in, we put people in jobs, and we don’t necessarily teach them how to do this,” Taylor said, adding that assessments are subjective and can involve bias. He said they’re sometimes uncomfortable, and when managers have existing professional relationships with direct reports sometimes it’s daunting to rock the boat, interpersonally.

Bias. In 2020, Mohamed, who identifies as an Egyptian Arab, raised issues she had with her white manager to a skip-level supervisor, the VP of education, flagging the problems as potential bias based on race. Mohamed pointed to requirements that she copy her manager on all emails and include her in all meetings with vendors and an incident in which she was discouraged from attending “an important project meeting that all team members were invited to attend,” according to the summary judgment.

Mohamed’s skip-level supervisor called a meeting with all parties to navigate the complaint, and set it for the following day. Court documents reveal the meeting didn’t go smoothly, and Mohamed’s manager ended up in tears. Herd called the subsequent meeting between Mohamed, her manager, and her skip-level supervisor “one of the most surprising missteps” by SHRM. While there are instances where it might make sense to bring all the parties together to create clarity and understanding, a discrimination or bias complaint probably requires more specialized reinforcements from HR and legal. “Having someone that’s not trained facilitating that conversation is just a mess,” according to Herd.

“Once the allegation is raised,” Taylor echoed, speaking broadly of claims based on race, gender, and other protected classes, “then naturally that person has to be pulled out of the loop. Their bosses on the operational side have to be brought in [and] HR and legal.”

HR investigations. “HR investigations can make or break a company’s legal defense. When done correctly, they not only uncover the truth, but also show regulators and courts that the employer took the matter seriously and acted in good faith,” according to an article published on SHRM’s website in July about conducting “bulletproof HR investigations.”

Herd recommended organizations tap experts with experience handling racial discrimination complaints when investigating and mediating these due to their potential severity.

SHRM, in its handling of the complaint, assigned an HR leader to investigate. Court testimony revealed the internal investigator, Mike Jackson, hadn’t previously handled an employment discrimination complaint. SHRM’s HR leadership, however, did not find that disqualifying and instead pointed to his experience handling “employee relations” issues.

“I remind people, every one of us in HR had our first investigation,” Taylor told HR Brew, acknowledging the org’s primary investigator was “not a particularly senior person.”

Taylor claimed a more senior HR professional with more specialized expertise reviewed Jackson’s findings, and those reviewed findings were then sent to the org’s then-CHRO. He suggested SHRM “followed, to the T,” best practices for pursuing HR investigations.

But court documents also reveal that Jackson consulted with Mohamed’s manager to ghostwrite email communications to Mohamed which would later be used to support her firing. The emails outlined “non-negotiable” deadlines for two projects, and declined any help or flexibility when Mohamed raised issues and asked for assistance.

“This same person in charge of investigating these concerns was also working with leadership and advising them on how to communicate in writing the emails,” Herd said. “It certainly doesn’t look and it doesn’t feel neutral…it is important to think, how would this look down the road if this was made public?”

Herd recommended that those tasked with investigating claims like discrimination or retaliation identify clearly to the employee what their role is and what neutrality means for the investigation, even if it’s not required by law.

Progressive discipline and dismissal. “Retaliation claims can be difficult for employers to defend,” reads a 2018 how-to explainer published by SHRM. A later 2022 article on alternative complaint systems notes that nearly half of all discrimination claims create retaliation cases.

The judge in court documents denying a summary judgment, in which he called this particular employer-emplyee dispute a “messy employment discrimination case,” pointed to the timeline of Mohamed’s complaint, its investigation, and the preparation of termination paperwork as a critical issue in the case.

“The alleged protected activity—such as filing a discrimination complaint—often happens close in time to the employment action—such as a termination or poor performance review—which makes juries perceive a connection between the two events,” an Ogletree employment attorney was quoted in the SHRM how-to article.

As Mohamed neared the “non-negotiable” deadline for two projects she was assigned, issues with vendors, which she had flagged in an email thread with her manager (the same thread Jackson was helping ghostwrite), “offers an opportunity to get the right language on the table to correct her quickly, or to support an eventual case for termination,” the then-SHRM chief global development officer told Jackson, according to court documents. Additional claims she was being retaliated against for speaking up went unanswered, according to court documents.

Herd noted that a termination shouldn’t come as a surprise, and chided SHRM for failing to expressly indicate in the emails the consequences for “missing the deadline” (termination) or articulate what completion means. Mohamed had encountered timing issues with external vendors and had flagged these issues ahead of the deadline. She and SHRM disagreed on whether the work she had submitted on time constituted completing the assignment.

“If someone is going to be potentially terminated for employment, for performance, they should have a deadline. They should have commitments ongoing from their manager,” Herd said, noting that Mohamed appeared to not have received any sort of performance improvement plan (PIP) ahead of her termination, or any support with issues she was facing.

A 2025 SHRM white paper on the PIP says it can be used “when an employee’s performance consistently falls below the company’s expectations,” suggesting that rather than a punitive measure, the PIP “provides a formal, structured opportunity for the employee to understand the issues, improve performance, and meet the required standards.”

Taylor told HR Brew that Mohamed’s performance issues predated her discrimination complaint and were leveled as early as late February. In her deposition ahead of trial, however, Mohammed testified she’d had no challenges with her new role and, indeed, said she’d already been performing “senior” duties prior to her title bump.

Herd again pointed back to those previous performance reviews, quoted in the summary judgment, that “rated Mohamed as a solid performer or role model in all criteria” and suggested her managers or SHRM’s leadership could have worked with her to identify new ways for the formerly “solid” or “role model” employee to be successful working on a challenging project.

But “when she’s asking for help, the response seems to be defensiveness, with an eye towards termination, not towards improvement, and that’s really important,” Herd said of the email conversations prior to her dismissal. “For HR, a best practice is to look at performance as really the goal of helping that person improve, to get to that deadline, to get to do their work successfully, not to make the cleanest exit.”

People decisions. Taylor told HR Brew one key takeaway from the lawsuit for companies and business leaders should focus on how people decisions are made.

“I think the biggest takeaway and lesson for CEOs is…if you don’t make the right people decisions, and that is specifically hiring and promotion decisions, because this is not a termination matter for me,” Taylor said.

Specific to the case, SHRM said in a statement released after the verdict, the “decision does not reflect the facts, the law, or the truth of how SHRM operates. We have acted with integrity, transparency, and in full alignment with our values and obligations. We remain steadfast in our mission, undeterred in our focus, and resolute in our commitment to stand up for what is right.”

SHRM also indicated it would appeal the decision.

HR Brew reached out to Mohamed’s counsel, Ariel DeFazio of Lowrey Parady Lebsack LLC and Hunter Swain of Swain Law LLC, for comment.