• By 2010, 51.4 percent of the total U.S. workforce will be forty years old or older.
  
  
• The Age Discrimination Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967 protects individuals who are forty years old or older from employment discrimination based on age.
  
  
• ADEA was amended in 1990 by the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act.
  More recently, courts have supported the “disparate impact claim,” which surfaces when a company policy has a disproportionate effect on older workers.
  
  
• As Baby Boomers move into their fifties and sixties, and Gen-X’ers into their late 40s, age discrimination suits are on the rise. Employees are becoming more assertive about their rights in age bias claims, with suits brought by individuals in their forties and fifties.
  
  
• Twenty percent of all employment discrimination charges filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) are for age discrimination, but this number does not take into account the private lawsuits that are often filed in state courts, where plaintiff lawyers prefer to go because state laws allow for more in damages.
  
  
• The number of settlements doubled between 1997 and 2006, increasing from 3.5 percent of cases to ten percent. Large class action suits are common.

Corporations will benefit by spending less time documenting defenses against age discrimination lawsuits and more time preventing them.