The Post-Groff Undue Hardship Defense Comes to Healthcare: Williams v. Legacy Health
Executive Summary
On May 6, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment in favor of Legacy Health in a Title VII religious-discrimination action brought by nine current and former employees who were denied religious exemptions from the hospital system’s COVID-19 vaccination policy. The panel held that Legacy carried its burden of proving undue hardship underGroff v. DeJoy, 600 U.S. 447 (2023), making the exemption denials lawful. This is a defense-side decision: there was no verdict and no damages award.
| Williams v. Legacy Health — Ninth Circuit, No. 24-5977 (May 6, 2026) | |
|---|---|
| Category | Detail |
| Disposition | Summary judgment for defendants AFFIRMED |
| Claims | Title VII & Washington Law Against Discrimination — religious failure-to-accommodate |
| Damages | None (defense judgment) |
| Controlling Standard | Groff v. DeJoy, 600 U.S. 447 (2023); Petersen v. Snohomish Reg'l Fire & Rescue, 150 F.4th 1211 (9th Cir. 2025) |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (appeal from W.D. Wash., No. 3:22-cv-06004-TMC) |
| Panel | McKeown (author), Paez, Desai |
| Decided | May 6, 2026 (submitted without oral argument) |
Case Information
Case: Williams v. Legacy Health (caption: Harold C. Williams, Jr., et al. v. Legacy Health, et al.)
Court: United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Appellate Docket No.: 24-5977
On Appeal From: U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, No. 3:22-cv-06004-TMC (Hon. Tiffany M. Cartwright)
Panel: Circuit Judges M. Margaret McKeown (author), Richard A. Paez, and Roopali H. Desai
Status: Published. Submitted November 20, 2025 (without oral argument); filed May 6, 2026.
Matter: Employment — religious failure-to-accommodate under Title VII and the Washington Law Against Discrimination, arising from denial of religious exemptions to a healthcare employer’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement.
Parties
Plaintiffs-Appellants: Nine current or former Legacy employees — Harold C. Williams, Jr.; Toby Higa; Daniela Marianu; Angela Loghry; Ivan Atanassov; Risa Brody; Aimee Sweet; Damaris Brici; and Brianna Hall. Their roles ranged from physician assistant to respiratory therapist to nurse to technician; all required close contact with patients or staff.
Defendants-Appellees: Legacy Health, a public benefit corporation operating eight hospitals across the Willamette Valley, and Northwest Acute Care Specialists, an Oregon professional corporation that contracted plaintiff Toby Higa to work at a Legacy facility (Higa’s claims were treated as rising and falling with the others).
Counsel
For Plaintiffs-Appellants:
• Appellate Law Firm (Seattle, WA)
• Pacific Justice Institute (Pasco, WA)
For Defendants-Appellees:
• Stoel Rives LLP (Anchorage, AK and Seattle, WA)
• Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP (Seattle, WA)
Key Findings
• The Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Legacy on the employees’ Title VII and Washington Law Against Discrimination religious failure-to-accommodate claims.
• The panel assumed without deciding that the employees stated a prima facie case; the appeal turned entirely on the employer’s undue-hardship defense.
• Applying Groff v. DeJoy (2023) and Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue, 150 F.4th 1211 (9th Cir. 2025), undue hardship requires a burden “substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business” — not merely “more than a de minimis cost.”
• Undue hardship may rest on health and safety costs and operational burdens, not only monetary loss.
• A realistic risk of hardship suffices; the employer need not wait for costs to materialize and is judged on the data available at the time of the decision (no hindsight from later vaccine data).
• Because no accommodation was possible without undue hardship, Legacy’s “blanket” exemption denials did not defeat the defense — the employer was not required to have attempted an accommodation at all.
• WLAD “creed” claims track Title VII, so the same analysis disposed of the state-law claims.
Factual Background
Legacy Health is a regional healthcare system that operates eight hospitals throughout the Willamette Valley. The nine plaintiffs all worked at Legacy’s Salmon Creek medical center in Vancouver, Washington, in roles that varied widely but shared one feature: each required close contact with patients or staff.
On August 5, 2021 shortly before Washington imposed its own complementary requirement, Legacy announced a vaccination policy across its hospitals. Legacy had previously encouraged voluntary vaccination but changed course with the onset of the Delta variant, which drove a surge of infections and hospitalizations, particularly among unvaccinated individuals. The policy required anyone performing services at Legacy’s hospitals to be fully vaccinated or to obtain an exemption by September 30, 2021, and it created a process, administered by a dedicated working group, for requesting religious or medical exemptions.
The employees timely applied for religious exemptions. Legacy denied the requests, placed the employees on administrative leave, and notified them that termination would follow. One plaintiff, Toby Higa, received the vaccine shortly after going on leave and returned to work; the remaining employees were terminated. The employees filed separate suits alleging religious discrimination under Title VII and Washington law. The district court consolidated the cases and, after discovery, granted summary judgment to Legacy. The court assumed the employees had made out a prima facie failure-to-accommodate case but found the denials justified because Legacy established the affirmative defense of undue hardship and the employees failed to come forward with evidence disputing that showing.
Analysis
A narrow but consequential addition to post-Groff authority. The Ninth Circuit has fielded many COVID-19 vaccine-exemption challenges, but, as Judge McKeown observed, it has had few occasions to actually apply the undue-hardship test the Supreme Court announced in Groff v. DeJoy. Williams now sits alongside the court’s 2025 decision in Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue as the controlling pair for evaluating these defenses in the circuit. Groff swept aside the long-assumed rule that anything “more than a de minimis cost” established undue hardship and replaced it with a fact-specific inquiry into whether the burden is “substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business,” accounting for the nature, size, and operating costs of the particular employer.
Health and safety as “cost.” The doctrinal heart of the opinion is its confirmation that the “substantial additional costs” Groff contemplates need not be monetary. Drawing on Petersen, the panel held that undue hardship can be shown through health and safety costs and operational burdens just as readily as through traditional financial loss. That distinction was dispositive here. Legacy did not argue that exemptions would be financially ruinous; it argued, with unrebutted epidemiological expert evidence, that unvaccinated frontline workers in a hospital setting posed a unique transmission risk during the Delta surge. The court identified three concrete hazards: staffing disruptions if exempt employees fell ill, infection risk to the co-workers needed to treat patients, and transmission risk to a patient population disproportionately burdened by comorbidities. In a healthcare business, the panel concluded, those health-and-safety concerns “make all the difference.”
Realistic risk and the no-hindsight rule. Two timing principles from Petersen did real work. First, the costs supporting an undue-hardship defense need not have been realized; a risk suffices, provided it is “realistic” and “not merely conceivable or hypothetical.” Second, the employer is evaluated on the scientific evidence and COVID data available to it when it acted. The court rejected the employees’ invitation to second-guess Legacy with later-acquired data suggesting that accommodating a handful of objectors might have posed little marginal risk, characterizing that as exactly the kind of hindsight reasoning Petersen foreclosed. For employers, the practical upshot is that a contemporaneous, well-documented risk assessment is what gets tested — not whether the feared harm ultimately came to pass.
The “particular business” principle favors healthcare defendants. Because Groff’s inquiry is anchored to the specific employer, the panel refused to let the employees import results from cases involving different industries or to point to other hospitals that granted religious exemptions. Those other employers were “not before” the court, and one institution’s choices do not measure another’s hardship. For defense counsel, this is a meaningful shield: it forecloses the common plaintiff argument that “everyone else accommodated, so you could have too,” and it places the focus squarely on the defendant’s own operating environment and record.
Blanket denials and the independence of the two defenses. The employees argued that Legacy’s “blanket” denials, without individualized consideration of proposed accommodations, should bar an undue-hardship defense. The court disagreed, reaffirming the longstanding rule from Townley that the good-faith-accommodation and undue-hardship defenses are independent. If no accommodation is possible without undue hardship, evaluating any particular accommodation is “an exercise in futility,” and undue hardship operates as a complete defense even where there was no attempt to accommodate at all. On this record, Legacy’s expert testified that there was “no effective alternative to vaccination” in the healthcare context — masking, other PPE, and regular testing among them. The employees offered nothing to rebut that categorical showing.
Practitioner takeaways. The decision is best read as a roadmap for the summary-judgment record. Legacy prevailed not because the law uniquely favors hospitals, but because it built a particularized, expert-supported, contemporaneous case for hardship that the plaintiffs left essentially unanswered. For defense counsel, the lessons are to develop industry-specific evidence tied to the employer’s own operations, to anchor the risk assessment to the moment of decision, and to document why each candidate accommodation fails. For plaintiff-side practitioners, Williams is a caution that argument is not evidence: defeating a post-Groff hardship defense requires affirmative record proof — competing expert testimony, or contemporaneous data showing a specific accommodation posed little marginal risk — rather than reliance on other employers’ choices or post hoc statistics. Finally, because the Washington Law Against Discrimination’s “creed” protections are construed in step with Title VII, the same proof problem sinks the federal and state claims together, which is a point worth front-loading in any WLAD-anchored matter in this circuit.
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