Managers in every department must be careful about age discrimination. But the issue is especially potent in IT, where skill sets change constantly and older employees who don’t quickly adapt may feel they’re seen as “obsolete.”

In one recent court case, a company was sued after reducing the size of its IT department.

The company had just finished a major software upgrade. When IT needed to cut staff, the company decided to keep employees familiar with the new system and terminate those who weren’t.

One employee who lost her job sued the company. She was 59 years old at the time.

She claimed older employees were shown the door while the younger ones were retained — and that the focus on the new software was just an excuse to cover up the company’s age bias.

Who won the case?

The court sided with the company and threw the case out.

Why? The employee was terminated for a legitimate reason: Due to the software change, her skills were no longer relevant to the company’s operations.

Employees who did possess the right skills may have been younger than her, but that didn’t mean her age was a factor.

The key to victory in this case: strong documentation about the decision-making criteria.

When deciding who to keep, the company looked at records of all employees’ previous experience and recent performance reviews about how they handled the change in software.

By showing how the RIF was carried out, the company was able to prove age played no role in the woman’s termination.

Cite: Liggins v. American Electric Power Co.

Workers age 55 and older make up 6.8% of the IT workforce — compared to 11.7% of the entire working world — according to a study by the Information Technology Association of America.

Is it because of bias? Not necessarily. In IT, compared to many other jobs, workers don’t stay in the field as long. That could be by choice, or it may have something to do with companies’ hiring preferences.

Given the ever-changing nature of technical work and many tech managers’ desire for creativity and innovation, IT departments can sometimes lean too far to the younger workers.

HR can help by training IT hiring managers and giving guidance in the hiring process to make sure the most qualified applicants are hired, regardless of age.

Also, companies could retain older, more experienced workers for longer by providing training to help them keep their skills up-to-date.

Do your managers know how to avoid writing e-mails that lead to huge legal trouble? Here’s an example of some supervisors who learned the hard way.

A 62-year-old employee was fired and believed it was because of her age.

According to the company, she was fired for poor performance. The woman had been placed on a performance improvement plan (PIP), and her manager kept a record of her weaknesses dating back several months before the termination.

But when the employee took the company to court, the judge ruled in her favor. Why?

The decision hinged on one piece of evidence: e-mails sent between two of the company’s managers before the employee was placed on the PIP.

According to the judge, the e-mails made it clear the bosses wanted to fire her before there were any documented problems. First, one manager suggested letting her go in a reduction-in-force. The second felt that would open the door to a lawsuit and recommended making it a “performance issue.”

Once that evidence came up in court, the judge ruled age was the real reason she was fired.

E-mail creates permanent evidence

The lesson in this case for your managers: Everything they say in an e-mail is recorded — permanently.

Sensitive issues like terminations should never be discussed over e-mail. If an employee sues, those messages will end up in court — and there’s no telling how judges will interpret what they read.

Cite: Parks v. Lebhar-Friedman, Inc.

You know the drill: Document, document, document. But managers don’t always follow that drill. And a recent case shows the damages a company can face when if a manager doesn’t keep current documentation.

An employee was asked to fire three workers in his department. He refused — they were all around 60 years old, and he believed the firings would constitute age discrimination.

The company fired him soon after, citing performance reasons. He sued for retaliation.

The timing already looked bad enough for the company, but here’s the kicker: Without documentation to support the employee’s poor performance, his manager tried to make up his own paper trail after the termination.

In court, the company submitted as evidence an e-mail sent to the employee from his boss, criticizing his performance. The problem was, as a court computer expert discovered, the e-mail was actually written two weeks after the lawsuit was filed and doctored to look like it was older.

The case went before an Ohio jury, which decided in the employee’s favor and awarded him the biggest verdict in Ohio history. The final price tag: $3.5 million for the employee’s lost wages and a whopping $43.1 million in punitive damages for tampering with the evidence.

No doctored documentation

If an employee has performance problems, but there’s no written proof, many managers might not think twice before writing something down later. But as this case shows, phony documentation is often worse than no documentation at all.

What’s can HR do? Regularly remind managers about the importance of having timely documentation — and help them understand that if they don’t, there isn’t much they can do about it.

Few things look worse to a judge or jury than evidence being destroyed or created once a company finds out it’s being sued.

Cite: Luri v. Republic Services of Ohio, LLC

The facts: A few offensive messages were sent from one employee’s e-mail address. He claimed he didn’t do it. His whole department shared the same computer, and it was common for one of them to log in to the system and stay logged on for the whole day. So, the employee said, it would have been easy for someone else to send the messages from his address. The company didn’t buy it, and fired him. He sued, claiming his age was the real reason he was terminated.

The employer said: It was obvious the e-mails came from the employee’s address. Based on what was known, firing him was the best option.

Who won the case?

Answer: The employee.

Why: It was a normal practice for the department’s employees to work on the computer while someone else was logged into the e-mail system. Therefore, the company couldn’t have known for sure who sent the message. And, since the company fired him anyway without taking other possibilities into account, the judge ruled there was enough it was a pretext for age discrimination.

Most companies have policies regarding how employees use technology, especially when it comes to sharing offensive content with co-workers. But that doesn’t do much good if it’s impossible to track individual activity. As this case shows, those policies should include restrictions on sharing accounts and log-in information.

Cite: Martinez v. General Motors Corp.