Two days.
That's the entire gap between John Shoemaker asking McKesson Corp. for FMLA leave and McKesson telling him he was fired.
A federal judge just said that two-day gap alone survives summary judgment.
Shoemaker was a Senior Director overseeing McKesson's contact center. In the spring of 2024, McKesson started planning a reorg. The company says that it locked in the decision to eliminate Shoemaker's position by December 2024, at least a month prior to anyone at the company knowing that he was even thinking about taking paternity leave. Typically, that's enough. Business decisions made for business reasons aren't retaliation just because a protected request comes along later.
But then it got messy. In January 2025, Shoemaker started quietly talking to HR about paternity leave. On March 3, he formally told his boss he'd be taking it that spring. McKesson says that in early March it picked April 11 as Shoemaker's termination date, but couldn't pin down exactly when, or produce anything showing that it did so before March 3.
Then, on April 9, Shoemaker formally requested FMLA leave. Two days later McKesson fired him.
Shoemaker was the only employee terminated on April 11. Everyone else caught in the reorg wasn't let go until July.
That's not just bad timing. That's a company that can tell you what it decided, but not when. And in a case like this one, the "when" is the whole ballgame.
Retaliation claims still require more than pure timing to survive summary judgment, and temporal proximity alone doesn't prove pretext. But in this case, Shoemaker had something more. He said his work didn't stop when he left. A coworker backed him up, testifying his job functions "did not cease." And unlike everyone else swept up in the RIF, he alone got cut two days after invoking the FMLA and months before the rest.
The court didn't need much more than that. Between the near-immediate proximity and the factual fight over why only Shoemaker's termination was accelerated, summary judgment was denied.
So what should you take away from this case?
1. Contemporaneous documentation matters. If your defense is "we already decided to fire this person before the protected activity," you need a document with a date on it, not a witness remembering "sometime in early March." If it's not on paper, it didn't happen.
2. If you jump someone ahead in line, know why. When one employee gets cut days after protected activity and everyone else in the same RIF survives another three months, you have to be able to explain that gap.
3. The line for what qualifies as a adverse action is a thin one. You don't get credit for "we were going to fire him anyway" if the record shows you fired him sooner because he took leave. Acceleration counts.
Employers, plan your RIF all you want. Just make sure you can back up not just why a decision was made, but also when.