## Facts

- A certified class of African American current and former employees challenged promotion practices for managerial and higher-level positions.
- Plaintiffs alleged promotions were frequently made without formal posting and often favored preselected candidates.
- Decision-making over promotions was largely subjective and decentralized, allegedly concentrated in mostly white managers.
- Plaintiffs claimed the system lacked uniform, transparent criteria, permitting racially biased promotion outcomes.
- Plaintiffs offered company-wide statistical analyses showing significant disparities in promotions and time-to-promotion between African American and white employees, including in comparison to “feeder” job groups.
- Plaintiffs also submitted anecdotal accounts describing being overlooked for unposted vacancies, steered away from advancement, or passed over for less-qualified white employees.
- The employer argued that decentralized, facility-level discretion and business-unit variation defeated any inference of a company-wide discriminatory practice and that plaintiffs’ statistics were methodologically flawed.
- The employer moved for summary judgment on classwide liability and separately challenged class certification and the admissibility of plaintiffs’ statistical expert.

## Issues

1. Whether plaintiffs’ statistical and anecdotal evidence could allow a reasonable jury to find a company-wide pattern or practice of intentional race discrimination in promotions under Title VII and 42 U.S.C. § 1981.
2. Whether plaintiffs stated and supported a disparate impact claim by identifying a specific, facially neutral employment practice that caused a statistically significant adverse impact.
3. Whether methodological disputes about plaintiffs’ statistical analyses justified summary judgment rather than resolution at trial.

## Decision

- The court largely denied the employer’s motion for summary judgment on the pattern-or-practice disparate treatment claims under Title VII and § 1981.
- The court held that plaintiffs’ combined statistical and anecdotal evidence created triable issues as to whether discrimination was a standard operating procedure in promotions.
- The court dismissed the disparate impact claim with prejudice for failure to identify and support a discrete, facially neutral employment practice under the disparate impact framework.
- The court treated most disputes about regression modeling choices and labor-pool definitions as issues of weight for the factfinder rather than bases for summary judgment.

## Legal Principles

- A pattern-or-practice claim may proceed when plaintiffs present evidence from which a reasonable jury could find that discrimination was the employer’s regular practice, assessed through a combined showing of statistical disparities and illustrative individual accounts.
- A company-wide discriminatory practice need not be a formal written policy; organizational structures and discretionary decision-making processes can constitute a practice if shown to operate in a consistently discriminatory way.
- In Title VII disparate impact litigation, plaintiffs must isolate and identify a specific employment practice and show that the practice causes a significant adverse impact on a protected group.
- Generalized reliance on “subjectivity” or “decentralization,” without identifying a discrete practice susceptible to impact analysis, is insufficient to state a disparate impact claim.
- Challenges to the design and interpretation of statistical analyses commonly raise fact disputes for trial when plaintiffs present facially competent statistical proof.

## Conclusion

The court permitted the class to proceed on a nationwide pattern-or-practice theory of intentional race discrimination in promotions based on statistical disparities reinforced by anecdotal evidence, while rejecting disparate impact liability because plaintiffs did not pinpoint a specific neutral promotion practice causing the alleged disparities.


McReynolds v. Sodexho Marriott Servs., Inc., 349 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2004)