Employee Survival Guide® - Pro See Race and Disability Discrimination: Michael Curtis v. Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Comment on the Show by Sending Mark a Text Message.What happens when an employee battles their former employer in a high-stakes legal showdown that intertwines race, mental health, and corporate compliance? Join Mark Carey in this gripping episode of the Employee Survival Guide® as he uncovers the riveting story of Michael Curtis, a former employee of Baird, who is navigating the treacherous waters of the federal court system without legal representation. This episode dives deep into the complexities of self-representation (pro se) in a case that raises critical questions about discrimination, retaliation, and the rights of employees in today's corporate landscape. As Curtis confronts severe mental health challenges, he finds himself in a hostile work environment where his requests for reasonable accommodations were met with indifference and hostility. The chilling reality of race discrimination looms large as Curtis alleges that his ex-employer discriminated against him when he sought help, only to face retaliation and unjust termination. Baird's claims of performance issues and dishonesty regarding attendance add another layer of complexity to this already fraught situation. Listeners will be captivated by the emotional toll that navigating the legal system can take on individuals who feel powerless against corporate giants. As Curtis's case approaches a pivotal summary judgment phase, the stakes couldn't be higher—he is seeking millions in damages while grappling with the procedural labyrinth of employment law. This episode serves as a cautionary tale about the pervasive surveillance culture in modern workplaces and its detrimental effects on employees seeking help for mental health issues. Through this compelling narrative, we explore the broader implications of workplace discrimination, the importance of employee rights, and the urgent need for corporate empathy. Whether you're an employee facing discrimination, an advocate for workplace equality, or simply interested in the intersection of race and employment law, this episode provides invaluable insights. Tune in to discover how to empower yourself in the face of adversity and learn essential job survival skills that could make all the difference in your career. Join us for a powerful discussion that challenges the status quo and advocates for a more equitable workplace culture. If you enjoyed this episode of the Employee Survival Guide please like us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We would really appreciate if you could leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leaving a review will inform other listeners you found the content on this podcast is important in the area of employment law in the United States. For more information, please contact our employment attorneys at Carey & Associates, P.C. at 203-255-4150, www.capclaw.com.Disclaimer: For educational use only, not intended to be legal advice.

Hey, it's Mark here. Welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide, where I tell you, as always, what your employer does definitely not want you to know about. And a lot more. Imagine stepping into a, well, stepping into a federal courtroom. Mm-hmm. And on one side of the aisle, you have this massive, incredibly well-resourced financial firm. Right. They are armed with teams of corporate lawyers, guys whose entire careers are built on winning these exact types of battles.

Oh, yeah, absolute heavyweights. Exactly. And then on the other side of the aisle, you have a single former employee. Just one guy standing completely alone fighting this corporate machine without a lawyer. It's intense. It really is. It is the ultimate high-stakes David versus Goliath scenario. So welcome to the deep dives.

Today we are taken on a massive stack of primary sources. I mean, we've got raw federal court documents pulled straight from the docket of the Eastern District of Wisconsin. A lot of rating for this one. So much reading. We are combing through initial complaints, the employer's answers, these incredibly thick summary judgment motions, and a brand new court order issued literally today, March 10th, 2026. Fresh off the press. Right. And our mission for this deep dive is to unpack the gritty, unforgiving reality of what it actually takes to fight a corporate giant pro se. Which, just for the listener, pro se is the legal term for representing yourself in court. Right, no lawyer. Yeah.

And we are going to explore a case that sits right at this incredibly complex intersection of race, mental health, and high-stakes corporate compliance. It is a, it's a monumental task to take on the federal legal system, pro se. The rules governing federal courts are just incredibly rigid. The margin for error is. Basically zero. Yeah, essentially zero. And the court does not pause the game just because you don't know the playbook. But to truly understand the mechanics of this specific case, we really understand.

really have to strip away the intense emotions involved and ground ourselves entirely in the objective facts of the legal battle playing out in these documents. And there's a really unique reason we are exploring this specific battle today. This case comes straight from the employee survival guide curated by Mark Carey. And he included this case for two very specific reasons that we absolutely need to share with you. First, the plaintiff in this case, Michael Curtis, is actually a listener of this deep dive. Which is amazing. It is. He personally sent in his pending federal case against his former employer and asked us to unpack it. And second, Mark agreed to post the case here in the survival guide because Michael Curtis is demonstrating a level of courage

and tenacity that honestly, many employees simply cannot stomach. It takes a lot of guts. It really does. I mean, he filed a pro se complaint against his former employer. He has been litigating against them in federal court, and he actually survived a motion to dismiss entirely on his own. Which we'll get into because that's huge. Definitely. And he is now facing the employer's summary judgment motion. So as of the publication date of this deep dive, Michael Curtis has until March 23, 2026. And that's a hard deadline. A very hard deadline pursuant to the strict federal rules to file his opposition to the defendant's summary judgment motion. And Mark is going to post a follow-up once that opposition brief is filed. And then again, when the court renders a final decision on the pending motion.

Putting your own active pending legal battle out there for public analysis like this, it takes an immense amount of vulnerability. Yeah. But for you, the listener, it provides this incredibly rare, real-time look into the actual mechanics of employment litigation rather than just, you know, reading a sanitized summary after a case is already closed and settled. Okay, so let's unpack this. Our plaintiff is Michael Curtis. He's a black male who worked as a compliance training and communication specialist at Robert W. You Bearden Company. This was from May 2021 until August 2022.

Okay. And to give you some context on the environment, Curtis notes in the court documents that he was the only black employee in a specific regulation and policy unit. Right. Now, for the first part of his employment, things seem to be going relatively smoothly. He even rated himself as meets expectations on his 2021 performance review. But the turning point where the friction really starts to build hits in the spring of 2022. Yeah, that's when the return to office push happens.

Exactly. Baird begins pushing for a return to the office, requiring their compliance employees to be in the building at least three days a week. And at this point, Curtis requests formal accommodations for his mental health, specifically citing severe anxiety and depression. And the paper trail here gets incredibly messy. The documents reveal two drastically diverging narratives of what happened next. And it is crucial we look at both sides impartially. Right. So from Curtis's perspective, he submitted formal medical documentation. from his health care provider. This documentation stated his condition was causing severe physical and mental symptoms. We are talking panic attacks, crippling migraines, vomiting, and significantly slowed thinking. Oh.

Yeah. And because of this, he requested remote work flexibility and the ability to have delayed start times on days he was experiencing those severe symptoms. Makes sense. But Curtis claims that almost immediately after he made these requests, the entire environment changed. He was hit with this highly burdens temporary account. accommodations document, which he argues introduced new punitive performance expectations that had

never been there before. Oh, wow. Yeah. And he also alleges he began facing what he called phantom feedback and racial microaggressions from his direct supervisors, Elizabeth Kaplan and Krista Graverson. To bolster his claim, he points out that white colleagues, he specifically names a senior compliance officer named Izzy Field, were not subjected to this intense level of scrutiny. So you read that and it paints a picture of a really hostile reaction to a medical need. But then you flip over to the employer's filings and their lawyers present a completely different reality. The whiplash is very real. Baird's defense, as laid out in their summary judgment motion, claims they actually went above and beyond the required medical recommendations.

Really? Yeah, but before we get into their specific claims, we should define a couple of legal concepts that pop up constantly in the documents, FMLA and ADA. Oh, yes. Very good. Very important. Baird notes that Curtis was denied FMLA leave. That stands for the Family and Medical Leave Act. FMLA is a federal law that protects your job when you need to take unpaid time off for serious health reasons. But here is the catch. You generally have to have worked for the employer for a full 12 months to qualify. And he started in May 2021, and this is spring 2022. Exactly. Curtis hadn't hit that one year mark yet, so he was legally denied FMLA. However, Baird emphasizes that they still granted him accommodations under the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Okay. They allowed him to take time off as needed and permitted him to work from home up to four days a week. And that seems reasonable on paper, right? But the crux of Bair's defense isn't about the accommodations themselves. It is about his actual work output. Right. They allege Curtis had severe preexisting performance issues that these new medical accommodations did not excuse. Their legal team submitted documents outlining complaints from other employees regarding

Curtis consistently missing project deadlines. They noted he frequently had a yellow or idle status on Microsoft Teams during scheduled working hours and mandatory meetings. They documented failures to upload required compliance courses to the internal system and cited just a general pattern of poor communication with the team. It highlights a foundational tension in employment law. An employer is legally required to provide reasonable accommodations to help an employee perform their job. However, the employer is not legally required to lower their essential performance standards or excuse a failure to do the actual work. Yeah. Baird's argument is that the increased scrutiny wasn't retaliation at all. It was standard performance management of an employee who is failing to

meet the basic metrics of his role. I mean, put yourself in those shoes for a second. Imagine being in this high-stress corporate compliance environment. You were trying to manage severe mental health symptoms, dealing with panic attacks and migraines, while simultaneously. feeling like your every single move right down to how long your mouse sits still and turns your Microsoft team status yellow is being heavily monitored, documented, and weaponized against you. It's exhausting just thinking about it. The tension is palpable, just reading these emails back and forth. That level of microscopic surveillance absolutely amplifies anxiety, creating a terrible feedback loop. The more he was monitored, the more stressed he likely became,

which can further impact performance. Okay, here's where it gets really interesting. We reach Early August 2022, the tensions between Curtis and his managers are incredibly high. They have had multiple tense meetings about these performance documents and his attendance. And Curtis sends a message to his supervisor, Elizabeth Kaplan, explicitly stating that he will be coming into the physical office on Friday, August 5th. And that Friday is the catalyst for the termination. Baird's administrative coordinator reported to management that she did not see Curtis in the office at all that day. This prompted Baird's HR and security teams to pull the electronic security badge scans. And the system data revealed a massive discrepancy.

Not only was there no record of Curtis scanning into the building on August 5th, but the data showed he had not swiped his badge to enter the office building since July 14th. Wow. So a few days later, on August 9th, Curtis gets called into a meeting with Kaplan, Graverson, and an HR representative. When they confront him with a hard digital data showing he wasn't in the office on August 9th, 5th, things rapidly escalate. Yeah, they do. Baird's filing state that Curtis raised his voice, gave highly inconsistent answers, and eventually claimed he followed people through security, so he didn't need to swipe his badge. Peggybacking. Right. But when pressed, he couldn't name a

single person he supposedly followed in. So Baird fired him right then and there, officially citing dishonesty and insubordination as the reasons for termination. But Curtis pushes back. He pushes back card in his filings. He claims that Baird never had a formal policy stating badge scans were used as an attendance tracking mechanism. He argues this entire badge scan situation was a manufactured pretext, a convenient excuse to fire him because of his race and his disability. What's fascinating here is the immediate aftermath of that termination, specifically regarding a regulatory document called a Form U5. Oh, the U5. Yeah. For anyone listening who hasn't worked in the financial sector, the form U5 is an incredibly critical piece of paper.

It is a permanent regulatory record filed with Fenora, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Whenever a registered employee leaves a financial firm, the Fern is legally obligated to file this firm stating the specific reason for termination. It follows you everywhere. It is essentially your permanent record in the finance world. And Baird filed Curtis's U5, stating he was discharged for, quote, performance. And Curtis is now suing them for definitive. over that single word. He argues that listing performance as the reason for his termination is a false and defamatory statement. His logic is that it completely contradicts his earlier

meets expectations review from 2021, and he points out that he hadn't received any formal disciplinary write-ups prior to the dispute over his mental health accommodations. Defamation is an incredibly tough claim to win in an employment context. Very tough. Defamation generally requires you to prove that someone made an objectively false statement a fact to a third party that caused you reputational harm. And Baird's defense is twofold here. First, they argue that performance is a completely accurate, albeit broad, summary of an employee who was ultimately fired for severe attendance issues, missing deadlines, and dishonesty during an HR investigation. Right. Second, and more importantly, for the legal mechanics, Wisconsin law

provides a very strong statutory privilege for employer references. The law presumes an employer's statements about a former employee are made in good faith. So how do you break that? To break that privilege, Curtis would have to provide clear and convincing evidence of actual malice, meaning they knew it was false and filed it anyway just to hurt him. Furthermore, Curtis initially sued his individual managers for defamation, but the deposition transcripts show he admitted under oath that he doesn't actually have any proof those specific individuals authored or submitted the form to FI and R. They were simply acting in their standard professional capacity for Baird. It is a massive web of claims.

We have race discrimination, disability, retaliation, defamation, all tangled together. But despite the massive hurdles of being a pro se litigant, Kyrriss actually scored a huge early victory in this case. Back in December 2025, he survived a motion to dismiss on his Section 1981 race discrimination claim. He fought off a team of corporate lawyers entirely on his own and kept his lawsuit alive. That is no small feat. And we should clarify what that actually. means. In federal court, a motion to dismiss is the very first gatekeeper. The employer essentially looks at the initial complaint and tells the judge, even if we assume every single thing this plaintiff says

is 100% true, it still doesn't add up to a violation of the law, so throw it out. Exactly. Surviving that motion means the judge looked at Curtis's story and said, if he can prove this, he has a valid legal case. And the judge, in this case, Judge Stattnuller, issued a very detailed ruling to explain why Curtis survived that stage, focusing heavily on a legal standard known as but-for causation. So what does this all mean? How does but-for causation actually work in his civil rights claim like this? Think of but-for causation as a hypothetical rewind button. The court asks, if we rewind the tape and change just one single factor in this specific claim, the employee's race with the outcome have been different. Got it. The defense lawyers tried to use a

very narrow interpretation. They argue that because Curtis was also claiming he was discriminated against due to his disability, his race couldn't possibly be the only reason he was fired. Therefore, they argued the race discrimination claim should be thrown out. Oh, I see what they tried to do there. Right. But Judge Stapmuller firmly rejected that logic. He ruled that real-world events can absolutely have multiple but-for causes. You can be targeted for more than one reason. At that initial pleading stage, Curtis's specific allegations that he was subjected to entirely different performance expectations than his white colleague Izzy Fields and that he faced racial microaggressions, those were legally sufficient to pass the test and move the case forward into the discovery phase.

But moving into the discovery phase is where the sheer crushing weight of a federal lawsuit really begins to show. We fast forward the timeline to March 2026 right now. Yeah. The cases move from that initial gatekeeping stage to the summary judgment phase. This is the put up or shut up phase. The employer is now asking the judge to throw the entire case out because after months of gathering emails, depositions, and data, they claim there simply isn't enough actual evidence for jury to bother deliberating on. And the financial stakes of this case have skyrocketed. The filings reveal that Curtis's damages request escalated from an initial demand of $33.6 million all the way up to $68.3 million.

And Baird's legal team uses their summary judgment memo to heavily target the reality of that damages figure. During his sworn deposition, the defense lawyers pressed Curtis on exactly how he calculated those tens of millions of dollars. Curtis admitted on the record that the amounts were speculative and based entirely on how I feel. Oof, that's tough. He also increased his demand for emotional distress damages to $50 million, claiming he had new facts, but he refused to disclose what those facts were during the deposition. Furthermore, the defense aggressively pointed out that his claim for roughly $57,000 in lost back pay was severely undercut by his own subsequent success. Oh, so?

The documents show Curtis secured a new job at Allstate less than a year after leaving Baird, and his starting salary there was actually $46,000 higher than what he was making at Baird. In the federal legal system, you simply cannot ask a jury to award tens of millions of dollars based on emotional feelings. You need concrete, mathematical methodology, and almost always, expert economic testimony. Curtis explicitly stated he would not be providing any expert testimony at trial. Which brings us to the most urgent and frankly sobering document in our stack today. The court order issued by Judge Stapmuller on March 10, 26. This order is a stark reality check about the unforgiving procedural nightmare of litigating in federal court. It truly is.

The Eastern District of Wisconsin operates under very rigorous, comprehensive protocols and procedures for summary judgment motions. One of the strictest rules is that before the judge will even look at the legal arguments, both sides must formally meet and confer to draft a joint statement of facts. They literally have to sit down and agree on a master list of the undisputed realities of the case. And the communications between Curtis and Bear's lawyers regarding this joint statement completely broke down. The court documents show that Curtis significantly delayed submitting his revisions to the

factual record. He cited tragic, unexpected deaths in his family as the reason for the delay. The court's order explicitly stated it was deeply sympathetic to his bereavement and the personal tragedies he was navigating. However, a federal judge is managing a massive docket, and they noted a severe, ongoing pattern of delay. The judge pointed out that Curtis repeatedly missed heavily extended deadlines that he himself had explicitly promised the court he would meet. The ultimate breaking point seemed to be a court-mandated, meet-in-conference. phone call between Curtis and the defense attorneys. According to the court's filings, Curtis attended this highly technical call, which was meant to hash out complex legal documents

line by line while he was driving his car. He stated he was unable to look at any screens or documents and indicated to the opposing counsel that he would likely be driving any time the defense was available to meet in the future. So dealing with these repeated delays and the impossibility of conducting a legal review while the plaintiff is behind the wheel. The judge ruled today that Baird's lawyers are allowed to proceed with their own statement of facts. That's a huge blow. It is. This ruling effectively locks Curtis out of adding any more of his own context or nuance to the official factual record that the court will use to decide the entire case. Ironically enough, the document the judge accepted from Baird did actually include the 200 additional facts

Curtis had previously asked to add. But the door is now permanently closed. for any further factual negotiations or additions by the plaintiff. If we connect this to the bigger picture, this March 10th order perfectly encapsulates the monumental burden of being a pro-say litigant. When you choose to represent yourself, you aren't just stepping into a room to argue the moral facts of your life or your deep belief that you were wronged by your boss. You're arguing the rules. Exactly. You are fighting against rigid, unforgiving procedural rules. You are managing incredibly strict deadlines while going up against teams of highly paid corporate lawyers whose entire job is to find and exploit procedural weaknesses.

The court absolutely gives pro se plaintiffs some leeway because they aren't trained lawyers, but as Judge Stapmila wrote today, that leeway has a hard limit when it begins to consistently disrupt the court's schedule and the rights of the opposing party to a timely resolution. It is a massive, exhausting journey. We started with a localized dispute over remote work schedules and a yellow Microsoft team status, and we watched it escalated. into a $68 million dollar federal lawsuit that is currently balancing on a razor's edge. And that clock is ticking loud. To you, the listener, remember the stakes here.

Michael Curtis has until March 23, 2026, to file his formal legal opposition to Baird's attempt to throw this case out completely. This raises an important question, something for you to mull over as we wait for the next filing to hit the docket. This case highlights a terrifying new reality of the modern workplace. Yeah. We are moving into an era of total digital. surveillance, where AI and tracking software can monitor our keystrokes, our mouse movements, and the exact second we scan a badge. If every single digital footprint can be pulled, analyzed, and weaponized the moment an employee requests a medical accommodation, what kind of

chilling effect does that create? Will employees simply stop asking for the mental health help they desperately need? Terrified that asking for a lifeline will trigger an audit of every minute they spend in front of their screen? That is a phenomenal and unsettling thought to leave on. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the realities of pro se litigation and the high-stakes environment of corporate compliance. Keep an eye out for our follow-up deep dive once the judge makes a final decision on that summary judgment motion. We'll be right here to unpack it all. Hey, it's Mark, and thank you for listening to this episode of the Employees' Fibba Guide. If you'd like to be interviewed for our podcast and share your story about what you're going through at work and do so anonymously,

please send me an email at m-C-R-E-Y at c-c-c-c-law.com. And also, if you like this podcast episode and others like it, please leave us a review. It really does help others find this podcast. So leave a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to this podcast. Thank you very much. And I'm glad to be a service to you.