The Trials of Workplace Justice

An American Bar Foundation report suggests just how difficult it is to win employment-discrimination cases at the federal level. Of 1,788 randomly selected federal employment-discrimination cases filed from 1987 to 2003, only 6 percent went to trial, and only 2 percent overall resulted in a plaintiff's verdict. Nearly a quarter of the claims were filed pro se, even though 40 percent of the employment-discrimination cases filed without legal representation were subsequently dismissed. (Only 11 percent of cases filed with representation were dismissed.)

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