What the Court Actually did in Mobley v. Workday

by Heather Bussing

Photo of one of the courtrooms at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

I’ve been reading articles about the trial court’s March 6, 2026, order in Mobley v. Workday and they don’t make sense to me. So I pulled the order and here’s exactly what happened. The TLDR is: not much, carry on.

But for my fellow employment law nerds, here’s the story and analysis.

The motion

Workday moved to dismiss portions of the latest complaint by Mr. Mobley and some additional Plaintiffs that were added to the Complaint.

A motion to dismiss (federal court) or a demurrer (state court) is basically a legal “So what?” The defendant says, even if everything in the complaint is true, the Plaintiff still doesn’t have a claim because there’s a legal reason why they can’t make this claim in this case. The idea is to avoid factual issues that require hearings and evidence and just look at the viability of the claim from a purely legal perspective. These motions happen at the beginning of the case to get rid of the claims that won’t work.

Theoretically, it saves everyone time and money. But sometimes it’s a merry go round of complaints, challenges, amended complaints, more challenges, lather, rinse, repeat. This case is on the merry go round track.

Workday had a few arguments, most of them not that great. One kinda worked, but not really. Here were the issues.

Can job applicants bring disparate impact cases for age discrimination?

First, Workday claimed that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act did not apply to disparate impact claims by job applicants. A disparate impact case is when a policy or practice of the employer adversely affects a protected group.

Workday argued that Congress considered amending the ADEA to specifically say that it applied to disparate impact claims by job applicants, but the amendment didn’t pass, so the ADEA doesn’t apply in this situation. The court didn’t buy it because, well, if you can have hiring policies that discriminate against protected classes and nobody can challenge it, it pretty much undermines the whole point of discrimination law. And this is Workday, who claims to be an expert in HR. Sigh.

The other problem was that there are lots of cases, regulations, and courts that have determined that job applicants can bring disparate impact cases for age discrimination. They’ve been doing it for years. So it came down to speculation about what Congress was doing versus decades of legal analysis by courts and the EEOC.

Next Workday tried arguing that the court doesn’t have to listen to the EEOC anymore because the Supreme Court changed all that in 2024 when it decided Loper Bright. Except Loper Bright says courts don’t always have to defer to agency interpretations of law; it doesn’t say they can’t. After all, sometimes agencies do get it right. It would be silly to have a rule that says courts can’t ever listen to the agencies whose job it is to interpret and implement statutes.

So, neither of those arguments worked. Of course they didn’t work. That’s the part that confused me. Why is Workday, who is represented by a very good law firm, making sketchy arguments and wasting everyone’s time?

It’s hard to say. My guess is that it’s Workday’s strategy to fight everything and delay as much as possible.

Sometimes motions and delay is partly about putting economic pressure on the Plaintiffs who generally have fewer resources. But this is a landmark case with tons of firms on the Plaintiffs’ side. They are in it to make new law and will do what it takes.

Mostly I think Workday is trying to narrow the issues down so that they can figure out how to settle this thing before it becomes actual law that will harm the business.

Or maybe they are planning on taking this to the Supreme Court where law doesn't matter as much anymore.

Can non-California Plaintiffs bring state discrimination claims under California law?

Some of the Plaintiffs in the case are not California residents but have alleged claims under California’s anti-discrimination laws. Sometimes this matters; other times it doesn’t. It depends on the facts. But here, Workday said there aren’t any facts that tie these people to California so they should not be able to bring claims under state law.

The court agreed. But the Plaintiffs argued that they could allege facts that would make a difference in the analysis and court said they could amend the complaint to allege those facts.

Although, Workday technically won this argument, the Plaintiffs will just amend the complaint and it won’t matter.

Can a job applicant allege disability claims for cancer and asthma for being rejected by an ATS?

This is the one issue that’s pretty interesting. It’s possible to extract a lot of information about someone from a job application that gives their address, zip code, what schools they attended, and all the places they worked. You can make pretty good guesses about race, age, gender, whether they have kids, and a lot of other stuff. (See People Analytics.)

The Plaintiffs claimed that Workday’s AI screening tools included “assessments and personality tests” that could also reveal disabilities and potential mental issues like “anxiety” or “depression.”

It’s a good argument. But it’s doubtful that screening tools for job applicants are going to reveal that someone has cancer or asthma. And there weren’t any allegations in the complaint that the AI screening tools could determine that particular Plaintiff’s disabilities in this case.

So the court got rid of the disability claim for the Plaintiff who has cancer and asthma because even AI can’t figure that out. Yet.

This is going to be an argument we see a lot—that AI can extract information from the data it has, combine it with other information it has, and can discriminate based on stuff a job applicant never said. It didn’t work this time, but it will with different facts.

What’s next?

There aren’t any big takeaways from this motion. The Plaintiffs will amend the complaint. Again. They’re still working on whether it will be a class action. And the whole thing will drag on for months, maybe years.

In the meantime, it’s worth looking at what data from job applications and assessments is being used by tech tools, what data it gets combined with, and whether those processes have an impact on who does and doesn’t get hired.

Of course, the problem with looking is that you may also find problems. But it’s better to discover problems and address them than end up in a lawsuit like this. You will have less discrimination and fewer ginormous legal bills.

So monitor and audit your hiring outcomes by protected classes. If you’re worried, get your friendly employment lawyer involved to help you solve any issues and protect the information.