“That a lawyer ends up on the wrong side of this line does not make his position so evidently baseless that he should be sanctioned for pursuing it.”
Because counsel for a Muslim employee in this long running dispute against her former employer, which had been the subject of four district court opinions and three prior appeals, had at least two nonfrivolous grounds for summary judgment, the district court abused its discretion when it imposed sanctions pursuant to Section 1927 and ordered counsel to pay roughly $57,000 in costs. Reversing the lower court’s decision, the Fourth Circuit found the district court framed its Section 1927 inquiry too narrowly (Ali v. BC Architects Engineers, PLC, No. 24-1963 (4th Cir. Feb. 20, 2026)).
The employee, a Syrian-American Muslim woman who wears a hijab, had worked as a computer-assisted design drafter for an architectural services firm for a little over a year when she was fired. After her termination, she sued the firm alleging, among other things, that she was passed up for promotions and later demoted because of her race and that a coworker had harassed and discriminated against her because she was Arab. She also claimed that after she reported the discrimination and harassment to the firm’s owners, they retaliated against her.
Procedural background. Although the district court dismissed her claims, the Fourth Circuit reversed as to her retaliatory termination count. On remand, the case proceeded to discovery and evidence was...
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