7th Circuit upholds dismissal of discrimination suit against Infosys, agreeing that exclusion of plaintiffs' key…

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In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 25-2272 BRENDA KOEHLER, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED, INC. and INFOSYS PUBLIC SERVICES, INC., Defendants-Appellees. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. No. 13-cv-00885 — Pamela Pepper, Chief Judge. ____________________ ARGUED MAY 19, 2026 — DECIDED JULY 13, 2026 ____________________ Before BRENNAN, Chief Judge, and ST. EVE and KOLAR, Cir- cuit Judges. ST. EVE, Circuit Judge. Four former employees of or appli- cants to work for Infosys Technologies Limited, Inc. and In- fosys Public Services, Inc. (together, “Infosys”) sued the com- pany, alleging it discriminated against non-South Asians. Plaintiffs relied on an expert report by David Neumark, a la- bor economist who analyzed Infosys’s demographic data and 2 No. 25-2272 concluded that chance alone could not explain the de- mographics of Infosys’ employee population, as the founda- tion of their case. To Plaintiffs, Neumark’s analysis helped prove that Infosys engaged in discrimination. But the district court excluded Neumark’s expert opinions under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. The district court then denied Plaintiffs’ motion for class certification because it relied heavily on Neu- mark’s analysis. It later denied Plaintiffs’ request to supple- ment their summary judgment briefing with different data. Finally, the district court granted Infosys’s motion for sum- mary judgment. We affirm. I. Background A. Factual History Infosys is an India-based consulting and technology ser- vices company, with offices in the United States and around the world. Globally, it employs over 190,000 people, and in the United States it has over 20,000 employees. The four plain- tiffs—Gregory Handloser, Brenda Koehler, Kelly Parker, and Layla Bolten—either worked for or applied to work for In- fosys, and all four are of non-South Asian background. Handloser worked as a sales manager at Infosys. The com- pany evaluates the performance of sales managers and other employees every six months. At the start of a review cycle, In- fosys informs the sales managers of their target metrics for that cycle. At the end of the cycle, the sales manager provides a numerical evaluation of his performance, as does his super- visor. Infosys uses those entries to calculate the manager’s in- dividual “Performance Index.” It then weights each man- ager’s Performance Index against every other sales manager’s score; the output is the “Consolidated Relative Rating” score. No. 25-2272 3 The best such score is a “one plus” and the poorest is a “four.” During the April–September 2012 review cycle, Handloser gave himself a poor evaluation score, as did his supervisor. As a result, his Consolidated Relative Rating was a “four,” and Infosys terminated Handloser as part of a company-wide reduction in force that targeted employees who had received a “four.” Koehler applied to work for Infosys as a “Lead VMware/Windows Administrator”—a Milwaukee-based po- sition working on an Infosys project with Harley-Davidson. Koehler had many of the qualifications necessary for the role, but, after interviewing her, Infosys determined that she lacked the necessary “Microsoft Active Directory” skills and decided not to hire her. Parker worked for Infosys between 2010 and 2012 after the company took over the Harley-Davidson project, where Par- ker previously worked. Infosys informed Parker her position would conclude by the end of 2012. But Parker’s role contin- ued into 2013, and, in June 2013, she began working for SoftHQ—an IT staffing company that helps Infosys fill its temporary staffing needs. Through this, Parker stayed in her prior role at Infosys, though Infosys informed Parker her new role would end once the staffing need concluded. For her part, Parker claims she believed this was a permanent position. In September 2013, Infosys ended Parker’s position and, thus, terminated Parker. Bolten began working for Infosys as a “Test Analyst” in the company’s Washington, D.C. office in 2013. In this role, Bolten worked under Geeta Kulkarni. Bolten claims Kulkarni, who is Indian, harassed her on account of her non-Indian sta- tus. Specifically, after Bolten took a sick day Kulkarni com- 4 No. 25-2272 mented that “stupid Americans” are “lucky” they can take sick days, and at a group meeting, Kulkarni did not let Bolten talk about her background, calling them “American experi- ences,” while allowing other test analysts to share stories about their background. Bolten also raises other instances of harassment, for example when, following the Boston Mara- thon bombing, a coworker noted that the attacker was Rus- sian and that Bolten was Russian as well, while pointing a fin- ger at Bolten, and that her coworkers, including Kulkarni, of- ten did not speak English at work when around her, including when discussing work-related matters. Bolten eventually reported these concerns, and her super- visors claimed they would address them. Bolten also shifted teams at Infosys several times. After one of these reassign- ments, Bolten moved her belongings to a new desk, but a new team member told Bolten someone else on the team already occupied the desk and directed Bolten to a different desk. Bolten responded, “you know what? I’m not moving any- where, I’m not doing anything,” and resigned. B. Procedural History In 2013, Koehler sued Infosys, alleging the company dis- criminated against individuals who were not of South Asian background through its hiring and employment practices. Af- ter adding Handloser, Parker, and Bolten in an amended com- plaint, Plaintiffs sought to represent a class of “[a]ll individu- als who are not of South Asian race or Indian, Bangladeshi, or Nepalese national origin who applied for a position with, or were employed by Defendants, and were discriminated against on the basis of their national origin or race in the last No. 25-2272 5 four years through the date of final judgment in this action.” 1 The complaint brought disparate treatment and disparate im- pact claims under Title VII and disparate treatment claims un- der 42 U.S.C. § 1981. 1. Motion to Exclude Expert During discovery, Plaintiffs sought to introduce the expert opinions of Professor David Neumark. Neumark is a labor economist whom Plaintiffs hired to analyze Infosys’s employ- ment data. After reviewing Infosys’s demographic data, Neu- mark concluded, for example, that “89.39% of Infosys’ United States workforce was South Asian,” whereas only 11.45% of the workforce in the relevant domestic industry was South Asian. According to Neumark, chance could not explain this disparity, along with similar disparities he found in other analyses. But Neumark’s analysis had a challenge. Infosys does not maintain demographic data on its employees and applicants at the level of granularity Neumark needed, so Neumark did not have a complete list of who among Infosys’s employees and applicants was of South Asian background. He did, how- ever, have access to national origin information for Infosys employees. So, Neumark employed his five-step “name- matching” methodology. First, Neumark created a list of the last name of every Infosys employee whose national origin was a South Asian country. Second, Neumark consolidated that list to last names associated with two or more employees. Third, Neumark reviewed the consolida

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