Employers who picture employment practices liability claims as synonymous with wrongful termination are working from an outdated map, according to Samantha Rodrigues (pictured), AVP of executive risk at HUB International. The coverage responds to a far wider range of workplace disputes than most companies assume, and while the underlying legal allegations haven't changed much, the situations that trigger them are shifting as workplaces themselves evolve.
Wrongful termination and breach of employment agreement remain the single largest category of EPL claims, Rodrigues said, but they're far from the only ones driving activity.
"We also see lots and lots of claims or allegations around harassment, be it sexual harassment or workplace bullying, anything of that nature. So that's a really big bucket," Rodrigues said.
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Discrimination and retaliation round out the core categories, she said, sitting alongside wrongful termination and harassment as the claim types brokers and underwriters see most consistently.
"Discrimination, again, be it age, sex, nationality, gender or anything really – discrimination is another big bucket," Rodrigues said. "And then another one is what we call retaliation, or reprisal as it’s sometimes described."
Beyond the type of allegation, EPL claims also arrive through two distinct avenues, Rodrigues said, each with its own volume and pattern. The first is the traditional route: a lawsuit filed in the court system. The second runs through administrative bodies, which vary by province but follow a similar structure across the country.
"In Ontario, it's the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. There's an equivalent across the provinces," Rodrigues said. "We see these administrative tribunal avenues as well, where we're going to see harassment and discrimination-type allegations."
Court litigation and tribunal filings between them capture most of what the industry considers the traditional shape of an EPL claim, Rodrigues said. What's changing now, in her view, is less the underlying allegation and more the circumstances that give rise to it in the first place.
Years of remote work arrangements and return-to-work policies have created a new backdrop for claims that still ultimately allege harassment or discrimination, Rodrigues said. An employee ordered back into the office, for instance, may frame that directive itself as discriminatory, layering a familiar legal claim onto a workplace dynamic that didn't exist in the same form a few years ago.
"The scenario causing this might be a return-to-work situation, but it could still be that it's harassment of some kind, or discrimination – you're making me go back to work because you're discriminating against me. But the wrapper around it now looks a little different," Rodrigues said.
A related and, in Rodrigues' telling, growing pattern involves accommodation requests tied to both mental and physical health, where employees increasingly raise questions about whether they're being treated fairly relative to colleagues.
The newest pressure point, according to Rodrigues, comes from how artificial intelligence and digital monitoring are being folded into employment decisions and day-to-day workplace conduct. AI tools are increasingly used in job postings and screening applications, drawing scrutiny to how those decisions get made, even when the resulting legal allegation is one insurers already recognize.
"There's a lot of eyes on how AI is being used in the employment field, be it in posting applications or job postings or going through applications," Rodrigues said. "The actual allegation is probably still going to stem down to the same thing. But where they're looking now is different."
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Privacy exposure is following a similar trajectory, surfacing in forms that wouldn't have registered as EPL claims a few years ago. Harassment increasingly plays out through texts, emails and social media posts rather than solely in person, Rodrigues said, and employers monitoring their own staff has become its own source of privacy-related risk.
Rodrigues framed both developments as variations on long-standing claim categories rather than genuinely new ones. The core allegations that drive EPL claims, she said, haven't changed much; what's evolving is the range of scenarios and technologies now capable of producing them, and insurers, brokers and employers alike are still working out how existing coverage should respond.
