"We treat our people well" is a culture statement, not a defense strategy. Most employers who get sued believed it sincerely — because employment claims aren't usually about villains; they're about timelines, documentation gaps, and processes that skipped a step under pressure. Here are the five patterns as they actually unfold, and what each teaches about the coverage.
How it unfolds: an employee files a comp claim, requests family leave, or reports an issue — and is terminated weeks later for documented-ish performance reasons. The lawsuit isn't about the performance; it's about the calendar. Retaliation is the EEOC's most-filed charge category for a reason: proximity is persuasive, and juries read timelines better than personnel files. Coverage lesson: retaliation must be a named covered peril — including comp-claim retaliation (the seam with your comp policy is mapped in EPLI vs workers' comp). Prevention lesson: document performance issues WHEN they occur, not when termination is decided.
How it unfolds: an employee tells a supervisor about harassment "informally." The supervisor handles it quietly, nothing is written down, the behavior recurs, and the eventual complaint pleads that the company knew and did nothing — which, on paper, it did. The case is decided by the 30 days after the first report, not the underlying conduct; how EPLI responds through investigation and suit is walked through in how EPLI responds. Prevention: every complaint gets an acknowledgment, an investigation, and a documented outcome — "informal" doesn't exist.
How it unfolds: an employee's condition (or injury — often straight out of a comp claim) requires modified duties. The employer, meaning no harm, waits for the employee to "get back to 100%" — and the failure to engage in the ADA's interactive process becomes the claim, independent of whether accommodation was possible. The EEOC's guidance is explicit that the process itself is the duty: EEOC guidance. Prevention: any medical restriction triggers a documented accommodation dialogue — even when the answer is ultimately no.
How it unfolds: misclassified exempt employees, off-the-clock prep time, missed break premiums — one demand letter becomes a group action, and the numbers multiply by headcount and years. The hard truth: most EPLI forms exclude wage & hour indemnity; the best you can buy is a defense-cost sublimit — the exclusion mechanics are in the wage-and-hour gap. Prevention is the coverage: a periodic classification-and-timekeeping audit is worth more than any endorsement on this pattern.
How it unfolds: a customer alleges harassment by an employee — or an employee alleges it by a vendor or customer the employer kept serving. Standard EPLI covers employee claimants; third-party EPL coverage is the extension that answers this pattern, and it's routinely left off small-business forms until the first claim finds the gap.
Employment claims are process failures with a court date. The five patterns repeat because the same steps get skipped — documentation at the time, response within the month, the interactive conversation, the classification audit, the third-party extension. Buy the policy for the defense costs; run the processes so the policy stays bored. Full coverage anatomy: what EPLI covers.
EPLI Quotes places coverage built for the real patterns - retaliation and third-party included, defense outside the limit where offered - plus the pre-claim HR helplines that keep patterns from becoming cases.
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