Litigating Race and Sexual Harassment Claims in 2026: Post-Rescission Standards, Arbitration Gateways, and Proving Pattern Harassment at Scale

Shane Seppinni, Trial Lawyer & Founder | Seppinni Law

Shane Seppinni is the Founder of Seppinni Law and a trial lawyer whose practice is devoted to employment litigation on behalf of workers, including sexual harassment and assault, workplace discrimination and retaliation, pregnancy discrimination, and wage and hour violations. He came to plaintiff-side employment work by way of a civil rights practice, a large-firm trial practice, and several years inside a major technology employer, a combination that informs how he investigates, frames, and tries harassment cases.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Seppinni earned his law degree from Stanford Law School and studied Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University. He was the first student from his public high school to be admitted to Cornell. At Stanford, he served as a research assistant to Professor William B. Gould IV, the former Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Seppinni founded Seppinni Law and leads its employment litigation practice. His work as a research assistant to a former Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board placed him alongside one of the principal scholars of American labor law while he was still in law school.

• Professional Involvement

During law school, Mr. Seppinni was a member of the Black Law Students Association at Stanford Law School and participated in the Workers Rights Pro Bono Clinic, representing workers in employment matters.

• Experience

Mr. Seppinni practiced as a civil rights lawyer at the Bronx Defenders, where he brought successful suits against landlords and employers, including Amazon. He also tried cases at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. Before entering law, he worked at Google as an HR Coordinator in People Operations, supporting the teams of now-Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, and as a Competitive Intelligence Analyst.

John S. Crain, Managing Counsel | Seppinni Law

John S. Crain is Managing Counsel at Seppinni Law, where his practice covers employment litigation and civil rights, including workplace discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment and assault, and wage and hour matters. He has guided clients through hard-fought litigation and has helped create precedents that other courts now cite. His background spans a large New York City firm, a federal district court clerkship, and a leading civil rights and employment boutique, and he brings that trial and appellate perspective to the firm’s discrimination and harassment caseload.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Crain graduated from Brooklyn Law School summa cum laude and second in his class. He was honored seven times for top lecture scores and received a faculty award.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Crain served as a law clerk to the Honorable Roslynn Mauskopf of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. In his practice he has developed precedents that are important and often cited, and he now leads matters at Seppinni Law as Managing Counsel.

• Professional Involvement

In 2026, Mr. Crain teaches a seminar on Litigating an Employment Case at Brooklyn Law School, his alma mater. He has also published twice on the history of American civil rights law.

• Experience

Mr. Crain began his career in the corporate department of a major New York City firm and later served as Of Counsel at a prominent New York City civil rights and employment boutique. He played an important role in confidential settlements of ten to twenty-five million dollars and won a $900,000 judgment in a pregnancy discrimination case in the Southern District of New York.

SESSION 1 – The 2026 Harassment Landscape: Severe-or-Pervasive After the EEOC Rescission | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

This session rebuilds the harassment framework without an agency roadmap. On January 22, 2026, the EEOC rescinded its 2024 Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace — the first comprehensive update to the agency’s harassment framework in more than twenty years — leaving counsel on both sides to reconstruct the severe-or-pervasive analysis from Harris v. Forklift Systems, Faragher, Ellerth, and circuit precedent, without the compliance checklist that shaped a decade of investigations, training programs, and Faragher/Ellerth defenses. State statutes, meanwhile, continue to supply a floor that in many jurisdictions sits well above federal law.
Attorneys will learn what the rescission removed and which authorities now control; how to run the severe-or-pervasive analysis and attack the Faragher/Ellerth defense from case law alone; what Muldrow’s “some harm” threshold does and does not change for hostile work environment claims; and how to choose among Title VII, Section 1981, and state statutes on damages caps, administrative exhaustion, limitations periods, and individual liability.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Proving Pattern Harassment at Scale: From Class Certification to Hundreds of Individual Trials | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

This session turns the framework into trial strategy, taught from inside the Tesla race harassment litigation. In November 2025, an Alameda County court denied class certification in Vaughn v. Tesla, holding that a jury could not reliably extrapolate from a sample of trial witnesses to a class of more than 14,000 Black workers. Plaintiffs’ counsel pivoted rather than appealed: more than 500 individual complaints have been filed, with over 900 planned. Forum fights are moving just as fast, as courts divide over how far the Ending Forced Arbitration Act reaches beyond the sexual harassment claim itself and what a plaintiff must plead to invoke it.

Attorneys will learn what the Vaughn court demanded on representative proof; how counsel restructured 900-plus claims into individual cases; how to build the pattern record through me-too evidence, investigation files, and the notice chain; how the EFAA and waiver doctrine decide the forum; and how to try emotional distress and punitive damages so the award survives post-trial review — drawing on the Diaz v. Tesla verdict, remittitur, and 2023 damages retrial.