The Seventh Circuit held that the Plaintiff presented sufficient evidence to establish that: (1) other brokers removed their names from unprofitable files and were not terminated; and (2) plaintiff's supervisors were hostile to Hispanics and attempted to pin losses on plaintiff in effort to force him out of his job.
Importantly, the Seventh Circuit rejected "direct" and "indirect" evidence framework when analyzing employment discrimination claims and must stop separating "direct" and "indirect" evidence and proceeding as if such evidence was subject to different legal standards.
The Seventh Circuit pointed out that the District Court treated the "direct" and "indirect" methods as having its own elements and rules, even though the Seventh Circuit has held that the tests are just means to consider whether one fact (here, ethnicity) caused another (here, discharge) and therefore are not “elements” of any claim. The district court’s effort to shoehorn all evidence into two “methods,” and its insistence that either method be implemented by looking for a “convincing mosaic,” detracted attention from the sole question that matters: Whether a reasonable juror could conclude that Ortiz would have kept his job if he had a different ethnicity, and everything else had remained the same.