Highlights

• The U.S. Supreme Court decided Murray v. UBS Securities, LLC on Feb. 8, 2024, holding that "whistleblower" retaliation claims under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 do not require proof of an employer's "retaliatory intent," defined as "animus," or hostility toward the protected conduct.
• The Court's opinion is most significant for confirming that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other similarly structured federal employee-protection statutes prohibit the same kind of intentional discrimination proscribed by Title VII and other federal anti-discrimination statutes.
• This Holland & Knight alert provides an analysis of Murray, drawing distinctions between "retaliatory intent" or animus and "discriminatory intent" and discusses how the high court's opinion will likely affect future "whistleblower" claims under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other statutes with employee-protection provisions.

In Murray v. UBS Securities, LLC, ¹ the case arose after Trevor Murray, a research strategist for UBS, was fired shortly after reporting to his direct supervisor that he had been "improperly pressured" to "skew" business reports and, consequently, commit fraud on the company's shareholders. Murray sued UBS, claiming that it violated Section 1514A of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act when it discharged him for reporting the asserted fraud to his supervisor. After a jury found in favor of Murray, UBS appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The Second Circuit...

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