A September 14 filing asks for a class
The named plaintiffs in Mobley v. Workday, Inc. asked the Northern District of California to certify a class on September 14, 2026. The motion sits at docket 418, and it carries the schedule the rest of this dispute now runs on. Responses are due by November 10, 2026, replies by December 8, 2026, and a hearing is set before Judge Rita F. Lin for March 9, 2027 at 10:00. The case number is 3:23-cv-00770, referred to Magistrate Judge Laurel D. Beeler.
Jill E. Hughes, Sheilah Johnson-Rocha, Derek L. Mobley and Faithlinh Rowe filed the motion. A supporting declaration entered the same day, docket 419, attaches forty-two opt-in declarations, three expert reports and excerpts from depositions. An order at docket 417, dated September 11, 2026, allowed each side forty-five pages for its class-certification memorandum, which is more room than a routine motion gets.
This account rests on the public docket itself. We could not verify first-tier reporting from the days after the filing, and the quotes circulating on at least one aggregator appear under a misattributed publisher, so no quotes from either side appear here. We read the public docket in Mobley v. Workday twice, and the entries above matched on both passes.
The defendant is the software vendor
The operational fact for anyone who owns screening configuration is who sits on the defence side. This case proceeds against Workday, the vendor of the software, rather than only against the employers who ran it. An allegation of discriminatory screening normally lands on one employer, and discovery covers that employer's own hiring. A claim aimed at the vendor reaches across the customers who used the feature the plaintiffs describe.
If a class were certified across a broad applicant population, the shape of the risk would differ from the usual employment claim for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits. A single proceeding would then cover applicants who applied to many different employers through one product. The court has not answered that question. Certification is precisely what the November and December briefing argues about, and the March hearing is where it gets heard.
Nothing on the docket establishes that any screening behaved the way the plaintiffs allege. These remain allegations, Workday has not yet filed its opposition, and no finding has been made either way. The narrower point for an HR systems owner is that your own configuration records stay entirely under your own control.
Much of the substance sits under seal
Docket 420, entered September 15, 2026, lodged the plaintiffs' supporting memorandum under an administrative motion to seal. Workday filed five declarations supporting that sealing on September 21, 2026. The memorandum would set out what the plaintiffs actually argue, and the public docket does not carry its contents.
That changes how you should read commentary about this case. Confident public claims about proposed subclass definitions, application volumes or offer rates are not drawn from the sealed memorandum, because the memorandum is sealed. Ask where any specific figure came from before it reaches a slide in front of your own leadership.
The docket also carries an internal inconsistency on the courtroom number, so we are not stating one. Where a primary record disagrees with itself, the honest move is to say so and leave the detail out of the story.
The documentation you should already hold
None of the practical work here depends on how this case turns out. Anyone running automated screening should be able to answer, on request and without a scramble, what the configuration actually does. Which fields feed a filter. Which knockout questions reject an application outright. Which of those settings arrived with a template that nobody on the current team reviewed.
Then the scoring. What ranking or score gets applied, on which inputs, with what weighting, and who approved it. A named approver with a date beats a policy document, because that person can still explain what the setting was meant to accomplish. The same problem that drives security group sprawl inside a Workday tenant applies to screening rules, since a setting with no owner is a setting nobody can account for.
Then the testing. What disparate impact analysis was performed before the configuration went live, by whom, against which applicant population, and when it was last repeated. A test run once at implementation and never again is a common answer, and a weak one. Retention comes last. How long records of automated decisions are kept, what a single record contains, and whether that record is enough to reconstruct why one applicant was filtered out eighteen months ago.
Most organisations cannot produce that documentation on request. That is true today, with no court asking for it, and it stays true whatever happens in March. The documentation earns its keep in vendor reviews, in audits, and in the meeting where somebody asks why a requisition produced the shortlist it produced.
Months rather than weeks to get ready
The calendar is the most actionable thing on this docket. Under the scheduling order of July 13, 2026, expert depositions tied to the motion are due by October 5, 2026. Workday's opposition and its own motion to decertify are due November 10, 2026. The reply on certification is due December 8, 2026, a decertification reply follows on February 10, 2027, and the hearing sits on March 9, 2027.
An HR systems team therefore has months rather than weeks before anything here produces a ruling. The sensible use of that time is documentation rather than waiting, since the earliest meaningful decision lands in 2027 and the work is work you needed anyway. The same discipline shows up in governance around Workday's own agents and in configuration drift across a comp cycle.
Pick one requisition that ran through automated screening in the last quarter and write down, on one page, every rule that touched it, who approved each rule, and where the decision record now lives. If your Workday HCM team cannot fill that page from the tenant without calling a consultant, you have found the first thing to fix, and you have found it on your own timetable instead of a court's.
