‘What’s a guy got to do to get a claim around here?!’

My teaching portfolio at the UNT-Dallas College of Law of course includes employment discrimination law. Here’s a fundamental principle I always try to impart to students: The facts of a case—no matter how wrong they might appear or how appealing to a jury they might sound—are 100% useless unless the lawsuit first asks and correctly answers certain threshold questions. Imagine a flowchart with an early, finite end point because a certain condition wasn’t satisfied. As with a flowchart, so too with the law.

Good work life turns bad

Rafael Friedrichsen worked as a wealth strategist for BBVA Compass Bank in the Houston area. From his perspective, work life was good. Under oath, he claimed he “received well above average performance reviews . . . (and) followed all employment procedures, code of conduct and ethics.”

Clouds popped up, however, when supervisor Jose Rodriguez allegedly began feeding more business leads to the wealth management team’s younger members instead of the 61-year-old Friedrichsen. In addition, the employee says he heard things from supervisors and coworkers about his age.

Things worsened when coworker Rosalva Guedea accused Friedrichsen of committing fraud by cutting and pasting a client’s signature onto a document. He proclaimed his innocence. After what he called a rushed and inadequate investigation by BBVA employees, he was pressured to resign but refused.