Your best practice for beating bias lawsuits: Keep accurate records of all HR decisions.

Here's HR's best employmentlaw bet: Assume every employee you fire will try to sue you. That means basing every termination decision on solid business-related reasons, documented in real time. Your good records will often be enough to get a lawsuit tossed out quickly.

Recent case: Joan, born in 1954, was an Internal Revenue Service revenue officer who could access taxpayer information through the IRS's computer systems.

Strict rules prohibit anyone from accessing that data unless they need it to do their jobs. In Joan's role, that meant she had to be officially working on a particular taxpayer's case to look up information. She received regular training on taxpayer privacy and knew she was not supposed to access information on taxpayers who weren't on her case list. The IRS had Joan's signature acknowledging she had undergone training.

Even so, Joan was accused of...