chro99Last week, the Legislative Program Review and Investigations Committee released a 129-page report on the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, with a focus on Discrimination Complaint Processing.  You can download it here.

The report is worth a deep dive at another time, and a final report from the Committee is due in January 2017.

Collins, left, addresses CBA; Shipman & Goodwin Partner Gabe Jiran, right, moderates.

At Monday’s Connecticut Legal Conference, CHRO Chair Gary Collins spoke for a bit about the developments at the oft-maligned agency since he’s come on board.  (You can follow all the tweets from the conference on Twitter using #ctlegalconf as

Last year, the General Assembly considered changes to the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. That bill did not receive a final vote. This year, it’s back but recently died in the Judiciary Committee, according to the CBIA.  Will it get attached to another bill? Will it be tweaked further this fall in preparation for next year’s term? My colleague, Christopher Parkin, chimes in with the details and why employers need to keep an eye on any proposed changes.

The ink is still drying on the most recent round of changes at the CHRO, the massive amendments known as PA 11-237 (in fact, the CHRO website still points to old versions of the General Statutes), but the legislature has been grappling with proposed changes to the statutes that govern the CHRO in the last few months.

These amendments, Senate Bill 385, represent a considerable effort to clean up antiquated language and recodify the statutes to make them more accessible to the public.    

Among the hundreds of technical amendments built into the bill are plenty of new substantive changes that employers and their counsel will need to become familiar with.  Recently the CBIA has noted that this particular effort has seemed to die in committee; however, the bill is likely to reappear at one point or another. Here are the details and the impact on employers when this is considered again.  

Investigator and mediator will no longer be the same person

The CHRO has long been criticized for its practice of combining the mediation and investigation process by assigning a single investigator to handle both duties, a process the Commission has insisted is a function of insufficient funding.  Until recently, mediations and fact findings were very frequently held consecutively in one marathon day. 

Nobody is best served when these processes are combined.  Neither employers nor employees can fully trust the confidentiality of the mediation process when the mediator will be tasked with soliciting testimony a few hours later if the case doesn’t settle. 

It’s also not fair to the investigators to expect that they can fully partition their brain between mediation and investigation to conduct both appropriately.


Continue Reading A New “CAR” And Other Proposed Changes to CHRO – Can They Get It Right?

Next week, one of my colleagues, Peter Murphy will be at the Connecticut Bar Association to present a program entitled “CHRO 101 – From Complaint to Public Hearing”.   Full details are available at the CBA website.

The program includes a discussion of

  • The Complaint Process, MAR (Merit Assessment Review), and Mandatory Mediation,
  • Responding to the

A new lawsuit filed last Thursday in Connecticut state court by an employer alleges that the employer’s due process rights are being violated by “inherently conflicted and irreparably unfair proceedings” at the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) — the state agency responsible for investigating and enforcing the state’s anti-discrimination laws. 

In the lawsuit,

Earlier this week, I wrote about the perception among some that the CHRO has been retaining more cases for investigation by letting more cases through the Merit Assessment Review.  These cases that used to be dismissed — mainly “frivolous” ones as  I’ve collectively termed them — mean more headaches for employers who have to spend time and money defending against them.

(To simplify the blog post for readers, I labelled all these cases that had been dismissed at MAR together as “frivolous” even though there are technically different reasons why the CHRO may dismiss a case on Merit Assessment Review, including that there is “no reasonable possibility” that an investigation will lead to a reasonable cause finding of discrimination. )

In response to my blog post, CHRO Principal Attorney Charles Krich crafted a reply. While it is attached to the original blog post, I thought it notable enough that it warranted its own blog post.   While he indicated that there were no statistics yet available, he “would not be surprised if fewer cases are being dismissed for no reasonable possibility” under the Merit Assessment Review.

Here’s his reply in full (my further comments are below):
Continue Reading CHRO Attorney Agrees Emphasis at Agency “Has Shifted From MAR to Mediation”