Like a helium balloon that escapes your grasp, a front-pay claim in an employment case can be particularly difficult to get your hands around when defending a claim brought under New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination (NJLAD). Front-pay claims (similar to back pay) have a tendency to escalate as a case slowly winds its way through the court system. An article published in this journal on June 20 (“Mitigating Front-Pay Damages in NJLAD Cases”), provided a summary of the Appellate Division’s groundbreaking April 5 opinion in Quinlan v. Curtis-Wright Corp., 425 N.J. Super. 335 (App. Div. 2012). The Quinlan decision serves to both clarify the law on when front pay can be sought, and to provide the precedent needed to challenge an inherently speculative claim for damages.
The need for defense counsel to eliminate a front-pay claim before trial is driven by the fact that the jury is left to decide how much to award a plaintiff in a CEPA or LAD case in state court, unlike the federal courts where such a decision is made by the trial judge, or some bifurcated procedure, depending on the Circuit in which the case is tried.
