The attorney who led a more than $12 million verdict for a woman fired for seeking religious accommodations to her employer's COVID-19 vaccine mandate is sharing his insight on the path to success in what may be only a handful of cases that have gone before a jury.

Last week, a jury for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan issued the multimillion-dollar verdict in favor of Lisa Domski, who argued that her Catholic faith exempted her from complying with Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan's vaccine requirement. In January 2022, Blue Cross Blue Shield terminated Domski for claiming that she did not have "sincerely held religious beliefs."

In August 2023, employment law attorney Noah Hurwitz of Hurwitz Law in Ann Arbor, Michigan, filed the lawsuit captioned Domski v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, which claimed Blue Cross ignored the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's instructions that employers should assume a worker's request for religious exemption is based on a sincere belief.

Domski's case may be one of four to go before a jury since the pandemic began in 2020, Hurwitz told Law.com.

“Increasingly, it’s more and more difficult to get to trial because of summary judgment, or just because of the pressure and force of courts to settle cases,” Hurwitz said. "Rarely can you find an instance where an employer imposes some sort of policy that's going to conflict with somebody's religious beliefs."

While plaintiffs across the country suing to recover lost business revenues during COVID-19 shutdown orders have had little success in litigation, employees have generally been faring better in religious accommodation disputes over employers' vaccination mandates. The EEOC has led some of the litigation, including a case brought against United Healthcare Services in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio in September 2023, which was scheduled for a mediation hearing Thursday.

According to Hurwitz, many of these types of cases have gone in the plaintiffs' favor under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires employers to assume that employees' religious beliefs are sincere.

“When all of this sort of happened at once and when we look at the jurisprudence of religious accommodation, we have a template for the cases that are ready for a jury almost at the outset," Hurwitz said.

Hurwitz Law has taken on around 500 individual employees who were allegedly terminated for noncompliance with vaccine mandates since the COVID-19 outbreak. Hurwitz said that he’s been contacted by "around two dozen lawyers" from around the country asking about strategies for success on the religious accommodation issue.

Hurwitz and his firm have also played a role in some key cases that were decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit earlier this year. Some of those cases include: Lucky v. Landmark Medical of Michigan and Sturgill v. American Red Cross, along with Savel v. MetroHealth System, which set a template for how to get religious employees past dismissals and summary judgment, Hurwitz said.

"That really opened up the door to say, if an employer didn't know this already, that you are supposed to assume the religious beliefs of an employee are sincere, and not undertake some sort of maniacal plan [to give] somebody a 15-minute interview to try and assess whether or not they have sincere religious beliefs," Hurwitz said.

Employees exercising their religious freedom protections have also been aided by the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, which established that religious accommodation plaintiffs are entitled not just to neutral treatment, but "favored treatment."

“As the law for employees has really been on the decline for the last four decades, the law on religious accommodation has always been really solid," Hurwitz said.

“I think we’ve enjoyed that [Supreme Court] ruling, and I wish it applied to more groups of our clients who we think have suffered discrimination," he continued.

Hurwitz clarified that simply deciding not to take the vaccine is not necessarily protected from a private employer’s decisions. Rather, it was the assumption that employees' religious beliefs were not sincere and were purportedly created in order to avoid getting the vaccine.

"A private employer can make you wear red everyday if they want you to. You’re going to have to deal with that and understand that’s the cost of having that job, and you can always leave," Hurwitz said. "This is a situation where we really have to respect the rights to receive an accommodation, and it’s either a religious accommodation or a medical accommodation under the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act]."

For Domski's case, the jury awarded back pay, front pay and noneconomic damages totaling $2.69 million, on top of $10 million in punitive damages to Domski, who was an information technology process specialist at Blue Cross Blue Shield since 2008. Hurwitz also commended Detroit-based trial attorney John Marko's work serving as trial counsel.

"When you're going up against a big company, a lot of times a small law firm like mine [needs] more resources," he said. "[Marko] answered the call and provided his expertise, so it was wonderful."

While he acknowledged that the $12 million for Domski was significant, Hurwitz said that the "true judgment" will be around $3 million due to statutory caps on punitive damages under Title VII.

U.S. District Judge David M. Lawson presided over the trial. The judge ordered both parties to file posttrial response briefs by Nov. 24. It was immediately unknown whether Blue Cross Blue Shield will appeal the verdict.

Counsel for Blue Cross Blue Shield, Angelina Rose Delmastro, Brandon C. Hubbard, Maureen J. Moody and Nolan John Moody of Dickinson Wright in Detroit, Michigan, did not respond to a request for comment.