Judge questions why partners faced no discipline for similar posts
Case against major law firm heads to trial over rescinding Muslim attorney's offer while partners whose posts violated firm values faced no discipline.
The decision, handed down January 26, puts Foley & Lardner on track for a jury trial over whether it treated a Muslim Arab attorney differently than her colleagues who posted inflammatory content about Palestinians.
Jinan Chehade had every reason to expect she would start her legal career at Foley & Lardner's Chicago office on October 23, 2023. She had sailed through her summer associate program the year before and accepted a full-time offer. But a week before her start date, everything fell apart.
The trouble began when a recruiting assistant at the firm searched for Chehade online, ostensibly looking for a photo for the new associate directory. What she found instead were Chehade's social media posts about the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
Chehade, who grew up in Bridgeview, Illinois, known as Little Palestine, had posted that day about colonization being inherently violent and supporting Palestinian resistance. A few days later, at a Chicago City Council meeting, she called the Hamas attack a natural response to 75 years of occupation.
The posts landed on the desks of firm leadership, including Chairman Daljit Doogal and former Managing Partner Stanley Jaspan. At first, several leaders thought no action was warranted. Jaspan even said a pro-Palestinian stance itself was not a problem. But as discussions continued, the tone shifted. Jaspan began circulating emails claiming Chehade was defending Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel.
The day before Chehade was supposed to start work, two firm leaders called her in for a meeting. They asked about her statements, her activism with Students for Justice in Palestine, and then the conversation took an unusual turn. They started asking about her father and his job at a local mosque.
When they asked point blank if she condemned the Hamas attacks, Chehade said she did not condone terrorism or Hamas. One of the interviewers wrote in her notes: "Do not condone terrorism. Do not condone Hamas."
It did not matter. That evening, they called Chehade to tell her the firm was pulling her offer.
What happened next at the firm tells its own story. In the weeks after October 7, other Foley attorneys posted their own takes on the conflict. One partner shared content calling for perpetrators to be liquidated as enemies of humankind. Another posted that anyone concerned about Gaza should keep their mouth shut, and that innocent people dying in war has zero relevance to whether the war is justified.
Firm witnesses later admitted those posts were not consistent with Foley's core values. But neither partner faced any discipline. The posts simply came down.
Another associate posted pro-Palestinian content under a username suggesting she was Catholic, not Muslim. She just got a reminder about the firm's social media policy.
When Chehade sued for discrimination, Foley asked the judge to throw out the case. But Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman was not having it.
The judge pointed out something striking: nowhere in the court record could she find a clear explanation of what Foley's core values actually were or what objective standards Chehade was judged against. If the firm applied the same values to everyone, the judge wrote, the different treatment of similar statements looked like disparate treatment.
The decision highlighted internal divisions at Foley. The firm's chief diversity officer actually wanted to let Chehade start work. After the decision came down, she told Jaspan she was disappointed about being left out of the process. According to the court, she said Jaspan compared Chehade's remarks to saying something anti-Black or inappropriate about a lynching.
Notes from the chief talent officer's conversation with the diversity chief included this line: "we have tolerated other harmful rhetoric in the past."
Arab American associates at the firm reportedly felt fearful after the decision, believing it was unsafe to express their views on the conflict.
The judge found plenty for a jury to chew on. There was the question of whether the firm really believed Chehade supported violence when she explicitly said she did not. There was the inconsistent treatment of employees who posted controversial content. There were those questions about her father and the mosque that had nothing to do with her own statements.
And there was a dispute about how the firm even found her posts in the first place. The recruiting assistant said she was looking for a photo. But Chehade said she had already submitted one, showing her wearing a hijab, along with a biography mentioning she was from Little Palestine. A jury might wonder whether her visible Muslim identity prompted the search, especially given the heightened scrutiny of law firm associates after October 7.
The judge made clear that discrimination cases rarely involve smoking guns. Employers do not usually announce they are firing someone for illegal reasons. Instead, courts look at the circumstances, the explanations offered, and whether they hold up under scrutiny.
Here, the judge found enough questions to send the case to trial. If a jury believes Chehade's version of events, they could reasonably conclude her race and religion played a role in losing her job.
For HR professionals, the case is a master class in what not to do. Asking job candidates about their parents' religious activities during an interview about their own conduct is a red flag. Applying social media policies inconsistently based on whose ox is being gored invites trouble. Sidelining diversity leadership when making sensitive decisions about employees from minority groups looks bad, especially if those decisions end up in court.
Perhaps most importantly, the case shows the danger of not having clear, written standards for evaluating employee conduct. When leaders cannot point to objective criteria they applied consistently, it becomes much harder to defend their decisions.
The case now heads to a jury, which will decide whether one of the country's major law firms discriminated against a young Muslim woman at the start of her career. Whatever the outcome, the path to get there offers lessons for any employer navigating the thorny intersection of employee speech, company values, and civil rights.
