Maryland court allows retaliation claims to proceed against Indian Creek School and SAGE Dining Services

For roughly a decade, Eric Hemphill ran the dining operation at Indian Creek School. In ten years on that campus, no one wrote him up, no one filed a performance complaint against him, and no safety incident was ever recorded. SAGE Dining Services, the company that employed him and placed him at the school, learned of his 1987 and 1997 convictions through fingerprinting around 2017, reviewed them, and kept him on the job. It then re-cleared him through background checks every two years for the rest of his employment.

On April 30, 2024, Hemphill sued the school over his son's education. Eighteen days later, the school demanded that he be removed from campus. Within two months he was out of a job.

On September 10, 2026, the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County refused to end his case. The court granted the defendants' motions in part and denied them in part, ordering that Hemphill's wrongful discharge claim against SAGE Dining Services and his claim that Indian Creek School wrongfully interfered with his employment both proceed toward trial. Justly Prudent represents Hemphill and had asked the court for precisely that result, conceding two claims it could not support while defending the two that matter most. The court also allowed the claim against SAGE to move forward notwithstanding the company's demand, raised only after discovery closed, that the dispute be sent to arbitration instead.

The ruling does not decide who is right. It decides who gets to decide, and the answer is a jury.

What the record shows is a sequence of events with difficult timing. After the school demanded his removal on May 18, 2024, SAGE placed Hemphill in an indefinite unpaid status. Four days later, the company sent him a notice of possible adverse employment action resting on the same decades-old convictions it had reviewed and accepted seven years earlier. His medical benefits ended. When he sought medical leave for the stress the situation was causing him, the certification process became an obstacle rather than a path. The single reassignment the company identified was under a manager Hemphill had previously reported for racist conduct. After he declined it, he was told there were no other openings. He resigned on June 28, 2024, in a letter that named retaliation as the reason.

The most striking evidence comes from one of the defendants. SAGE later sued Indian Creek School over the end of their contract, and in correspondence incorporated into that lawsuit, SAGE took the position that the school's stated loss of confidence in the company was pretextual and was instead connected to the litigation brought by a school parent and student. Meanwhile, a senior school official testified that the school first learned of Hemphill's convictions through discovery in this case, even though counsel for the school had cited those same convictions in a letter written in May 2024.

"Eric Hemphill spent a decade feeding children at that school without a single complaint against him," said Jordan D. Howlette, Managing Attorney of Justly Prudent. "Weeks after he went to court on behalf of his son, the school wanted him off campus and the company that had cleared him for years decided his past was suddenly disqualifying. A jury should weigh that timing, not a judge on paper."

A Note on Professional Courtesy

The road to this ruling included an episode worth recording. Earlier in the case, the court set a hearing on a date that fell in the middle of a long-planned family vacation abroad for Hemphill's counsel, at a time when Hemphill himself had recently relocated to Florida. Counsel notified the attorneys for both defendants of the conflict and the relocation, and asked whether they would consent to a request to appear remotely. Neither answered. The motion was filed without their positions because no positions had been given. Within minutes of the filing, both responded: one declined to state a position, and the other objected.

Counsel left his family and flew home from the Bahamas the day before the hearing, and then flew back the day after it, at meaningful cost in time and money. The hearing itself lasted under five minutes. Its only business was selecting dates for trial.

The Bar has spent years talking about civility and about the mental health and wellbeing of the lawyers who practice in it. Those conversations are worth having, and they are worth honoring in the small decisions that never reach a judge, like whether to answer an email asking for a courtesy that costs nothing to give. But that important subject requires a completely separate forum, in which Justly Prudent looks forward to addressing at greater length.

The case is Eric Hemphill v. Indian Creek School, Inc., et al. (Case No. C-02-CV-25-002096), filed in the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County, Maryland.