Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, EVIDENCE, DISCOVERY—7th Cir.: Expert’s testimony on South Asian names properly excluded due to flawed methodology, (Jul 14, 2026)

By Tulay Turan, J.D.

The expert admitted he lacked the experience necessary to identify if a last name was South Asian.

In a Title VII and Section 1981 race and national origin discrimination case, the Seventh Circuit affirmed a district court’s ruling that excluded an expert’s opinion on whether an employee or applicant’s name was South Asian. The appeals court ruled the expert lacked the qualifications to conduct a name-matching methodology, and his methodology was unreliable. The court also affirmed the denial of class certification because, absent the expert’s analysis, the plaintiffs could not meet Fed. R. Civ. P. 23’s requirements. Because it found a Teamsters claim required class certification, the court also affirmed summary judgment in the company’s favor on their pattern and practice claims. In addition, the employees’ individual claims failed due to a lack of pretext evidence (Koehler v. Infosys Technologies Limited, Inc., No. 25-2272 (7th Cir. July 13, 2026)).

Four plaintiffs, who are of non-South Asian background, either worked for or applied to work for Infosys, an India-based consulting and technology services company with offices in the U.S. and around the world. Infosys terminated one of the four due to his poor evaluation score as part of a company-wide layoff; it failed to hire one of them because she was not qualified, and it terminated another after it did not renew her contract for a temporary staffing position. The fourth one claimed she was constructively discharged because she was harassed due to her non-Indian status.

Complaint filed. In 2013, the employees sued Infosys, alleging the company discriminated against individuals who were not of South Asian background through its hiring and employment practices. The complaint alleged disparate treatment and disparate impact claims under Title VII and disparate treatment claims under Section 1981 based on race and national origin.

Expert opinions. During discovery, the employees sought to introduce the expert opinions of a labor economist whom they hired to analyze Infosys’s employment data. After reviewing Infosys’s demographic data, he concluded that 89.39 percent of Infosys’s U.S. workforce was South Asian whereas only 11.45 percent of the workforce in the relevant domestic industry was South Asian. According to the expert, chance could not explain this disparity, along with similar disparities he found in other analyses.

However, the expert did not have a complete list of who among Infosys’s employees and applicants was of South Asian background because the company does not maintain demographic data at the level of granularity that he needed. Instead, he employed his five-step “name-matching” methodology, which included (1) starting with Infosys employees whose recorded national origin was a South Asian country and creating a list of their last names, (2) narrowing that list to surnames shared by at least two employees, (3) manually removing 63 surnames that he believed were obviously not South Asian, (4) comparing the resulting surname list against the surnames of Infosys employees whose national origin was not South Asian and Infosys applicants, and (5) if a person's surname appeared on the list, he classified that person as South Asian; if not, he classified the person as non-South Asian.

Prior proceedings. In 2016, following the employees’ motions for partial summary judgment and class certification, Infosys moved to exclude the expert’s opinions. The district court granted Infosys’s motion to exclude the opinions because he lacked the qualifications to conduct a name-matching methodology, his methodology was unreliable, and, as a result, his opinions were irrelevant.

In the same decision, the district court also denied the employees’ motion for class certification. They had relied on the expert’s analysis in their motion and after his opinions were excluded, the court found they lacked the evidence necessary to satisfy Fed. R. Civ. P. 23. For the same reasons, the district court denied their motion for partial summary judgment.

In addition, the district court denied the employees’ motion to supplement their summary judgment briefing with demographic data that Infosys contracts with PeopleFluent to collect and analyze as part of its obligations as a federal contractor to conduct “affirmative action” analyses.

Motion for summary judgment. The district court also granted Infosys’s motion for summary judgment on all claims. It denied the pattern and practice claims the employees brought under International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, 431 U.S. 324 (1977) because it found a Teamsters claim required class certification and it had previously denied their motion for class certification.

Turning to the employees’ individual disparate treatment claims, it found three of the four failed at the pretext step because none could rebut the nondiscriminatory reason Infosys offered for the employment actions it took. It also found the fourth employee’s constructive discharge claim failed because she could not demonstrate a level of harassment sufficient to meet the claim’s high bar. The court also denied two individual disparate impact claims because the employees relied on the expert’s statistical analysis and, absent that analysis, they did not have evidence sufficient to demonstrate a disparate impact.

Issues on appeal. The employees appealed the decisions of the district court (1) excluding the expert’s opinions, (2) denying class certification, (3) denying leave to supplement their summary judgment briefing with the PeopleFluent data, and (4) granting summary judgment to Infosys on all claims.

Lacked qualifications. Finding that the district court properly applied Fed. R. Evid. 702 when ruling on Infosys’s motion to exclude the expert’s testimony, the court reviewed the decision for abuse of discretion and found none. The expert admitted at his deposition that he had no experience in name matching and no experience in identifying South Asian names. That alone was fatal to his qualifications, the court said.

The employees argued the court could overlook this because he only searched for “western names,” in which, they contended he did have experience identifying due to his upbringing in a western country. The court noted that even if he were qualified to identify western names, he remained unqualified to determine whether a western name was or was not also a South Asian name. He claimed he could identify who among Infosys’s employee and applicant population was South Asian based on last name, yet he admitted he lacked the experience or expertise necessary to identify if a last name was South Asian. Given his deposition testimony, the court found there was no error and no abuse of discretion in the district court’s conclusion that he lacked the qualifications necessary to provide his expert opinions.

Reliability. The court also found the district court did not abuse its discretion in concluding the expert’s methodology was unreliable when the employees did not offer evidence supporting reliability to the district court. They presented no evidence of the name-matching methodology’s testing, error rate, peer review, or general acceptance in the scientific community. In addition, the expert admitted he had no experience with the technique either.

Class certification. Because the court affirmed the district court’s decision to exclude the expert’s opinions, it also affirmed the denial of class certification. The court noted that at oral argument, the employees conceded that, absent the expert’s analysis, they could not meet Fed. R. Civ. P. 23’s requirements.

Supplementing briefing. The court next affirmed the district court’s decision to deny leave to supplement the employees’ summary judgment briefing. They knew of the PeopleFluent data as of mid-2016 yet only made the request to supplement their briefing in late 2022, after the district court granted Infosys’s motion to exclude the expert’s opinions.

Moreover, at the time the parties discussed the PeopleFluent data in early 2017, the magistrate judge repeatedly asked them what recourse they might want given Infosys’s failure to timely produce the data and offered them potential avenues to remedy the impact of Infosys’s shortcomings (including supplementing their summary judgment briefing). This occurred five years before they eventually sought to supplement their briefing. They rejected or ignored those opportunities and proceeded anyway. They are “not entitled to a do-over,” the court wrote.

The court also rejected the employees’ argument that the district court applied the wrong legal standard. They contended the district court should have applied Fed. R. Civ. P. 6(b) and the Supreme Court’s “excusable neglect” test. However, they never moved under that rule or otherwise put the district court on notice they believed the rule or test applied. Instead, they moved under Fed. R. Civ. P. 16 to modify the district court’s scheduling order so they could submit a new expert and reopen discovery. Thus, they waived their Fed. R. Civ. P. 6(b) argument.

Pattern and practice claims. Next, the appeals court affirmed the district court’s decision granting summary judgment to Infosys on the three sets of discrimination claims. Regarding the pattern and practice claims, the court found the district court correctly recognized that once it had denied the employees’ motion for class certification, the employees could no longer maintain their Teamsters claims. “Teamsters makes clear that a pattern and practice claim is conventionally brought as a class action,” the appeals court wrote. Because the court affirmed the district court’s exclusion of the expert’s report and denial of class certification, the employees could not maintain their pattern and practice claims brought under Teamsters, the court ruled.

Individual claims. Turning to the individual disparate treatment claims under Title VII and Section 1981, the court found three of the four employees failed to raise an issue of fact as to whether Infosys’s reasons for the employment actions it took against each of them were pretext for discriminatory animus. The fourth employee, who asserted a constructive discharge claim, failed to present evidence of a sufficiently intolerable work environment.

No pretext evidence. Regarding the first employee, Infosys fired the sales manager because he received the poorest possible score during the September 2012 review cycle, and the company-wide reduction in force targeted all employees who had received that score.

The second employee was not hired when she applied for a full-time position because Infosys determined she was not qualified for the role. She did not present evidence showing this was pretext. She also contended Infosys discriminated against her when it ended her position through SoftHQ, an IT staffing firm. However, Infosys presented evidence showing it believed her position through SoftHQ was temporary, it informed her of this during her time in the role, and it discharged her when it decided not to renew her role at the end of the contract period.

Likewise, the third employee’s failure-to-hire claim failed because she did not rebut Infosys’s nondiscriminatory reason for not hiring her. It interviewed her and decided she lacked the necessary Microsoft Active Directory skills needed for the role. She might have subjectively believed she was qualified, but such belief, without more, does not demonstrate pretext, the court said. As long as Infosys honestly believed it made the correct decision, her claims could not succeed.

Constructive discharge. In addition, although the fourth employee’s claim was slightly different (constructive discharge) because she resigned, it also failed because she could not demonstrate a sufficiently intolerable work environment. Her evidence included (1) comments about her being “American,” (2) a comment about her being Russian and connecting that to the Boston Marathon bomber, (3) that her colleagues spoke Hindi at work when discussing work projects, and (4) that when she moved desks, she was told to sit in a different place. Some of this was “crude and mean-spirited,” the court wrote, however, none of it involved physical threats or humiliation or otherwise amounted to the types of evidence required for constructive discharge.

Disparate impact claims. Finally, the court affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment to Infosys on two employees’ individual disparate impact claims. These claims failed without the expert’s analysis or the PeopleFluent data. The court said it typically required some form of statistical evidence to make out a prima facie case of disparate impact. Without statistical evidence, the court said the employees were “left with their experiences,” which alone could not sustain their claims. Accordingly, the court affirmed the district court’s judgment.

The case is No. 25-2272.

Judge: St. Eve, A.

Attorneys: Daniel A. Kotchen (Kotchen & Low) for Brenda Koehler, Kelly Parker, and Gregory Handloser. Brian James Paul (Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath) for Infosys Technologies Ltd., Inc. nka Infosys Ltd., and Infosys Public Services, Inc.

Companies: Infosys Technologies Ltd., Inc.; Infosys Ltd.; Infosys Public Services, Inc.

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