AI in Hiring in 2026: The New State Compliance Stack, the Preemption Fight, and Litigating Algorithmic Discrimination

Stephen Hayes, Co-Managing Partner | Relman Colfax PLLC

Stephen Hayes is a Co-Managing Partner at Relman Colfax. Stephen’s work focuses on nonprofits, large corporations, and governmental entities on a range of civil rights and consumer protection matters, including fair lending, fair housing, and employment discrimination. He has expertise on algorithmic discrimination, including advising on policies and procedures for testing models and strategies across a range of markets. He also led algorithmic discrimination monitorships and testified to Congress about civil rights issues. Stephen previously served in the Legal Division of the CFPB. Stephen is a member of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers and has presented at numerous legal conferences and universities.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Hayes earned his Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania. He is admitted in the District of Columbia, bar number 1010531, and in California on inactive status, and he clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Hayes serves as Co-Managing Partner of Relman Colfax PLLC. At Columbia Law School he received the John Ordronaux Prize for the highest academic average in his class, and he has since received awards from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has served as fair lending monitor for the Upstart Network lending platform.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Hayes writes on lending discrimination, special purpose credit programs, and civil rights enforcement, and presents regularly to the American Bar Association, the American Bankers Association, and university audiences.

• Experience

Mr. Hayes first joined Relman Colfax in 2011 and returned in 2018 after several years in the Legal Division of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he worked on rulemakings, supervision, and enforcement. Representative matters include National Fair Housing Alliance v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the reverse redlining class action Morgan v. Richmond School of Health and Technology.

Jack L. Hobaugh Jr., Shareholder | Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP

Jack Hobaugh combines his 18-year career as a software engineer, in which he designed and built relational databases, with his legal practice to focus on AI law and governance, cybersecurity law, and privacy law. Jack is a certified iapp AI governance professional (AIGP), privacy professional (FIP/CIPT/CIPP/US/E) and ISC2 Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP). Jack is equally at home whiteboarding technical solutions with product engineers, as incident counsel, or providing legal advice to inhouse counsel. Jack specializes in guiding start-up companies through the AI, privacy, and security compliance maze. His compliance focus is guiding products to production environment as opposed to being a naysayer. A guest lecturer and author of four books on cybersecurity law, Jack is sought out counsel for startups, and mergers & acquisitions. Prior to his legal career, Jack was a software engineer with a focus on international IT consulting and telecom (Europe / Middle East / West Africa / Brazil), writing his first artificial intelligence program in 1989 in LISP as part of his MS in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to litigating and prosecuting patents, Jack also served as a patent examiner for the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Hobaugh earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Masters of Laws from Georgetown University Law Center and The George Washington University Law School, and a Master of Science from Johns Hopkins University. He is active in Colorado, bar number 39,371, inactive in the District of Columbia and Virginia, and registered before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Hobaugh is a Shareholder in the Denver office of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP, where his practice spans privacy and cybersecurity, technology transactions, and mergers and acquisitions. He chairs the Denver KnowledgeNet Chapter of the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Hobaugh serves on the Colorado Bar Association Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Task Force. He speaks regularly at industry conferences, including the ISC2 Security Congress, SHRM, and InfoComm.

• Experience

Before entering law, Mr. Hobaugh spent eighteen years as a software engineer. He later served as a patent examiner with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and, in house, as senior counsel for privacy and security.

SESSION 1 – Building the AI Hiring Compliance Stack: California, Illinois, Colorado, and Texas | 2:30pm – 3:30pm

This session examines the four state regimes that now govern automated hiring tools and the ways they contradict one another, with a focus on the employer that screens applicants across state lines with a single system. Attorneys will learn which everyday HR tools count as automated decision systems and who bears the compliance duty as between employer and vendor, what an employer must do in Illinois now that the Department of Human Rights has withdrawn the notice rules interpreting HB 3773, how Colorado’s repeal and replacement of its AI Act traded the duty of care and annual impact assessments for notice, explanation, and human review, and why Texas TRAIGA’s intent-only standard produces a different answer than Illinois’ effects standard for the very same screening tool. Attendees will leave with an AI tool inventory, a notice matrix by jurisdiction, vendor contract language on bias testing and data access, and a bias-testing protocol built to be defensible rather than discoverable.

BREAK | 3:30pm – 3:40pm

SESSION 2 – When the Patchwork Meets the Courts: Preemption Pressure and Algorithmic Discrimination Litigation | 3:40pm – 4:40pm

This session turns from compliance to conflict, working through the federal campaign against state AI laws alongside the private litigation that is proceeding regardless of it. Attorneys will learn what a federal executive order can and cannot do to a state civil rights statute and which of the four state regimes is genuinely vulnerable, how the dormant Commerce Clause and compelled-speech theories hold up against notice and audit mandates, what exposure survives preemption under Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA, why the court in Mobley v. Workday treated a screening vendor as an agent of the employers using its platform, and how a disparate-impact case built on model output is proven or defeated. Attendees will leave with a preservation plan for inputs, outputs, model versions, and prompts, a privilege architecture for bias audits, and a way to document today’s compliance decisions so they read as reasonable to a court years from now.