Dallas Employment Lawyer Blog
Dallas Employment Trial Lawyer Austin Campbell
Summary: This article discusses a recent Sixth Circuit decision, Bruce v. Adams & Reese, which held that the EFAA prohibits employers from splitting up a case that has claims other than sexual harassment/assault. That is, if the case has claims exempted from arbitration under the EFAA, the whole case can go to court as one.
As previously discussed elsewhere in this blog, in 2022 the Biden administration signed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (“EFAA”) into law. This law made it clear that employers were no longer allowed to force employees to “hide” any sexual harassment and assault claims in private, confidential arbitration (where typically the decisionmaker is paid by the employer) instead of being allowed to go to court. This law was very important for workers because – beyond the fact employers could no longer conceal whether they had been sued for sexual harassment – in general arbitrations favor employers over employees. The law thus let workers keep their cases in more favorable venues, the courts.
One thing that old article noted that was less than clear was the question of what happened if an employee brought sexual harassment claims in addition to other legal claims – could those other claims be forcibly separated out and put into arbitration anyway? Some lower courts across the country have looked at the issue, but those are not binding precedents. On February 25, 2026, however, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision reached a definite answer – and that answer is no. In a case involving claims protected by the EFAA, everything can stay together in court.
This decision, Bruce v. Adams & Reese, LLP, 2026 WL 523180 (6th Cir. Feb. 25, 2026), does not directly implicate Texas because we are in the Fifth Circuit instead of the Sixth. The Fifth Circuit has never considered this particular issue. Yet, this case still provides guidance for lower-level courts in general and suggests a direction for the Fifth Circuit to go on this same issue.
In Bruce, the plaintiff brought sexual harassment as well as disability discrimination claims against her former employer. That employer, a law firm, tried to dismiss her sexual harassment claims and to move the disability claims to arbitration. The Sixth Circuit refused to allow either. Regarding the arbitration issue, the language from the EFAA that the Sixth Circuit focused on was the following:
[N]o predispute arbitration agreement or predispute joint-action waiver shall be valid or enforceable with respect to a case which is filed under Federal, Tribal, or State law and relates to the sexual assault dispute or the sexual harassment dispute.
The Sixth Circuit’s conclusion is very directly based on the text:
The operative word here is “case.” That is because it is “with respect to a case” that an otherwise-valid arbitration agreement is invalid and unenforceable. 9 U.S.C. § 402(a). All data point clearly in the direction of “case” encompassing a plaintiff’s entire suit . . . . With this understanding of the meaning of “case” in mind, the EFAA’s text renders an arbitration agreement “[un]enforceable with respect to” a plaintiff’s entire case, or action, and not only with respect to certain claims therein.
More conservative jurisdictions, such as the Fifth Circuit, may tend to be more swayed by so-called “textualist” analyses like this. The Court also looked at various other indications of Congress’s intent in drafting the EFAA, such as comparing it to similar laws, and ruled that these too supported the same outcome. In the end, Bruce’s entire case stayed in federal court. The conclusion is clear: based on this decision’s interpretation of the EFAA, employers cannot break up a case and send part of it to arbitration if it includes sexual harassment or assault claims. Now the question is, when this issue is eventually before it, will the Fifth Circuit agree?
If you believe your employer has discriminated against you or failed to protect you from harassment, you may want to talk to an employment lawyer like those at Rob Wiley, P.C.