take it away to everyone this is judge reed language and thank you for your flexibility in appearing today by telephone and for your patience while we just worked out the technical difficulties that we just had with having the wrong phone number to call and we wanted to send our best wishes to mr lipos family we're going to hear argument today in morris versus charter communications number eighteen dodge fifty five  thirty nine in which the beachside will have ten minutes i was going to keep time on a stopwatch here in front of me but i realize no one else can see it so please watch your time as well and if you would like me to give you a two minute warning when you have two minutes left please let me know that when you begin speaking and i will try to watch the time here please have to do that anyone have any questions before we begin  before a jury but we never had the opportunity because we believe the chalk court iranian state granted a motion for summary judgment i think fundamentally the trial court decision to terminate plaintiffs and the focus of dispute i believe in this legal dispute here is on whether or not there are tribal issues of material fact as to whether or not determination was reporting unlawful conduct at all i had trouble finding any california case that said that it would be a violation to make a single comment can you help me with how to cause a single  manager mr hardest day and it was interpreted by not only plaintiff but other african american employees as racist in nature and plaintiff present t isolated comments do not violate the fisa so it in left it leads that they're severe in the extreme and so this was not even just isolated comments plural but a single comment and i'm not sure that it was severe in the environment a person can be the victim of a single act of what they perceive to be sexual harassment and believe reasonably that they were sexually harassed even though it might not sustain a claim for sexual harassment but if they report that that's still a protected activity and what you have this says like one comment that is perceived to be harassing is a nod to make it a reasonable thing to think there's a hostile work environment  well first of all is not whether or not the conduct was itself a violation of the fia but whether the person reporting it had a reasonable belief in shall we say erroneous in other words as a matter of law doesn't rise to a violation of the sea but the report itself is meeting with say by a person who has an experience that they reasonably believe fell to make out a claim for retaliation that person must have both subject if we believe that the employer was a good one liners i couldn't but also that it was objectively reasonable to big that and so i'm not sure it's true that her subject of good faith about that because i agree i read the evidence that you had and it does seem like there's a high likelihood or a number of instances where multiple workers would be created but that doesn't preclude the alternative that d you know we don't want i mean they they're treating this is that from the company effectively and they did an investigation and what what regard are we supposed to get to that investigation the fact that that investigation you know that there could be reasons why these work orders in some instances could be duplicated if the company looked at it and said yeah we don't believe that a need for constantin those are justifiable reason and it sounds like there are many potentially credible reasons why multiple multiple work orders would be done that would have been a different conclusion you know that the senate in it parkin evidence never said well some of were some work orders multiple work orders were legitimate and some weren't some were fraudulent their home presentation is that multiple work orders are forbidden  evidence we presented is that every week the store manager sits down with each salesperson and goes over their prior week sales and they have in front of them all the work orders and difference from that is well you know the strike they were never counseled it was improper to do it they were never disciplined for they're never told that anything they've done is wrong with regards to that so you know the inference from that is that you know it does happen in the thank you good morning your honor may i please the court this is k p morris not related to the plaintiff cynthia morris just have the same last name counsel for respond in such charter communications and time warner i to forgive ask for forgiveness for any arguments that are more trial related so i just wanted to respond to a few of the comments that were made by plaintiff's counsel just in his last argument about the company's position that any multiple or wherever whenever there's multiple order that automatically a violation of company policy and that's actually not what the evidence shows what the were legitimate situations where there was a reason to have two orders on the same account and there was only twenty seven dollars out of the ninety three dollars that were only one or two minutes apart and those were the ones that they took issue with and when they interviewed her the plaintiffs she admitted that she put in multiple orders and she said she just didn't think that there was anything wrong with that she said some of them might have been because the customer changed their mind afterwards but she didn't say all of them or about that she simply didn't have a reason for it she said that not only in her interview with the investigators but also at her deposition in this matter with regard to whether or not i common in the workplace for there to be multiple work orders there's simply no evidence showing that this was a common thing or that it that it was accepted just because two other employees happened also engage in it's inappropriate conduct doesn't make it ok i will counsel can i can i push back a little bit on that because i mean that sort of the impression i got until i looked at this more it's exacerbated and i got to be honest like a lot of the it seems like this is someone coming calling in and changing their equipment or their plan their cable plan i mean that seems to me to happen all the time so i think seems to me there's there's got to be something distinguishing here where i think you're hitting on it at the beginning thing was you're right there is times when sometimes you would have multiple orders in her case out of the red flag on the twenty seven dollars with that they were entered literally like one minute apart she would take off  an h b o order and then put it right back on one minute later which means the person the still standing right in front of her when she was entering that order whereas other instances of multiple work orders would be in situations you know they would be maybe ten minutes apart the person you've already entered the order done it and then and then maybe they changed their mind or they came in later that day and exchanged something or they call back or whatever the case maybe she didn't really have an explanation for those when and that's why they held them against her for those particular one now in this case so i think we're sort of getting in the weeds here because this case has a very simple you know a straightforward case of retaliation and in this case there simply is no causal link between her terminations and the investigation and this complaint about this comment which i agree with your analysis that it wasn't in fact you didn't rise to the level of harassment and it wasn't reasonable for her to even believe that she admitted in her deposition that after the comment was made and they spoke to her the comment was made on march th they spoke to her on march th she didn't complain that that it was racially  with the the supervisor that was there on a day to day basis mr hurd if he was a manager who only occasionally went to the store and see where our office site is he was coming to the store as the overall manager correct and he had been told there had been complaints that the employees on saturdays weren't available for customers and that's why he went to the store that day and he was happy when he got in the store and he thought all the boys in there working available for customers and that's why he said oh glad i didn't walk in on an illegal dice game and he explained that he had recently seen a guy go commercial where you know when the you know that kept away the mice will play and all the employees were not working and then when the boss walked in they all ran to her desk and that's what spawn the comment and anyway but the point is that she didn't actually complain about this comment until march th which was after the audit was concluded that incident said hey if there's anybody in your store that you think might be engaging in this type of conduct i want you to audit their behavior and at that time in the beginning of february which on campus and there are two employees actually that are that i think maybe engage in this kind of contact i'm going to do an audit on them and said yes please do and she informed mr cain tanith the h r manager that she was going to do the investigation and she started the audit in february before the comment was ever made the two people that were investigated mr franco and this morris were both audited and they were both terminated for this identical conduct mr frankel never made a complaint about this comment and in a comment had nothing to do with this morse's termination was a completely legitimate audit that was done on employees for the kind of counting one thousand other employees were terminated for the exact type of violations of their standards of business conduct what happened to the other people who complained about the store that had been terminated for fraudulently entering work orders to increase his commission he asked miss on cancer there if there's anybody in your store that you think may be engaging this content conduct we'd like you to audit them and if that i had just been informed by some of the people in her store that they were concerned with miss moore and because of the plaintiff's because they said on saturdays she was the lead and she was often in the back of the store doing paperwork or january early february when mr hardesty talked to the supervisor that's when she said hey i'm suspicious of miss morris and this other employee mr franco because both of their sales numbers are really high that i've gotten reports that they're not really working with the customers so it seems a little fishy i actually wanted on it those people and so that's why she started the audit of them prior to this common ever happening and they were both terminated for it because the audit revealed that they had the multiple work order story it was just the two of them so you said there were nineteen people terminated for this exact reason but when i looked at the sites on that it seems like about half of them were for other reasons like you are one to three is someone who misled that were terminated were terminated by said deseret chestnut she's the director of the department and interview anybody who violates the standards of business conduct a are to essentially what they consider stealing from the company meaning getting commission that did that wasn't owed that's what you were talking about similar conduct fraudulent caught conduct that increased their commissions that essentially amounted to what they considered stealing from the company and in doing what it's more into mr franco did and there was several other employees that did the same thing mr gorman who was the one that was fired from the van i start for that exact same contract that falls in the same category with these other