Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

The results are in: attorneys are filing more employment law cases in court.  Indeed, year-end reporting from legal databases like LexMachina confirm that the pace of filing new employment discrimination cases reached its highest level in 2025, surpassing 20,000 new filings nationwide.  Though overtime and minimum wage lawsuits under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have continued to decline since 2015, discrimination cases under laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act are on the rise.

On February 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division proposed a new rule to determine whether workers are independent contractors or employees under federal wage-and-hour laws.

The National Labor Relations Board (“Board” or NLRB) can have up to five sitting Board members, but only three are needed for the NLRB to have a quorum. The Board had been without a quorum for most of last year but now has three sitting members thanks to two new additions last month. It marked the first time since the start of President Trump’s second term that a majority of Board members have been Republicans.

The National Labor Relations Board’s (“NLRB”) then-acting General Counsel recently issued Memorandum GC 26-01, announcing a new, agency-wide docketing procedure that significantly reshapes how charges are processed. This move comes in response to a growing backlog, which has been exacerbated by both the unprecedented 43-day government shutdown and persistent staffing shortages in regional offices.