The suit alleges HR upheld disputed write-ups, then fired him on vacation
A Lowe's project manager says he was fired after taking paternity leave — and the trail of write-ups, he alleges, began within weeks of his first request.
Maximo Plasencia filed a federal lawsuit against Lowe's Home Centers, LLC on February 24, 2026, in the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the home improvement giant retaliated against him for doing something the company's own policy allowed: taking time off to care for his newborn son.
The case, Plasencia v. Lowe's Home Centers, LLC, spans six counts across Title VII, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the Florida Civil Rights Act. But for HR professionals, the allegations read less like a legal brief and more like a cautionary playbook on how internal processes can go sideways.
Here is the timeline Plasencia lays out. He formally requested fifty percent of his paternity leave on or about June 5, 2024. Roughly two weeks later, he received his first verbal performance warning. The reasons, he alleges, were vague — generalized comments about communication style with no concrete examples cited.
Months later, in late November 2024, he told his supervisor, Aaron Minton, that he planned to take his remaining leave. On or about December 5, a second warning landed, this time citing a timeline error from a meeting nearly three weeks earlier. No one had raised the issue before his renewed leave request.
After returning from approved leave in January 2025, Plasencia alleges the scrutiny intensified — daily or near-daily monitoring and discipline for infractions he describes as trivial. Among them: a two-second transition in a PowerPoint presentation and an accidental date misstatement. He alleges that similarly situated colleagues who had not taken family leave were not disciplined for comparable or even more serious mistakes.
By June 2025, Plasencia filed an internal complaint with human resources, pushing back on the warnings and flagging what he believed was a pattern of retaliation. He warned that he feared the company was building a case to fire him. HR upheld the disputed actions.
Within about a week, while Plasencia was on approved vacation, he was terminated during a Microsoft Teams call with Minton and HR representative Chandra Green. The stated reason was a failure to implement feedback on a project called Care Connect. Plasencia alleges that Minton had explicitly told him to hold off on that project and wait for further instruction.
That is the detail likely to land hardest with HR leaders: a termination rationale that, according to the allegations, directly contradicted the employer's own prior directive.
The case is still in its earliest stage. These are allegations, not findings, and Lowe's has not yet responded. No court has weighed in on the merits.
But for anyone managing leave policies, performance documentation, or internal investigations, the pattern Plasencia describes — write-ups that surface only after protected leave requests, an internal process that upheld them, and a termination built on a reason the employee says he was told to delay — is worth reading closely.
