Whistleblower retaliation litigation is on the rise, and a recent decision from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is expected to boost it further. Whistleblowers can expect to find protection against employer retaliation as courts continue to make statutory protections more readily available. Companies are not without protections themselves, however. The trend in these cases has also established key factors employers should monitor to increase the likelihood of success against such claims.

The New York decision is part of a rising trend among some other courts to remove old barriers to whistleblower retaliation complaints. In Sharkey v. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., et al, the plaintiff alleged “violations of the SOX anti-retaliation statute.” The district court initially found that the plaintiff had not sufficiently identified the illegal conduct on which she based her whistleblower complaint. Ultimately, the district court renounced the prior court-established pleading standard for whistleblower claims and paved the way for a far more lenient pleading standard under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). In doing so, the court followed a trend among the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third and Sixth Circuits. Now, whistleblower retaliation protections may be easier for employees to obtain and tougher for employers to defeat based on imprecise allegations.

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