Six months into her job, Latreecia Folkes had launched a new project and received a letter of praise from her supervisor. And then, she says, she was told to train her replacement on the project, a worker from India. She balked at that but was replaced anyway.

Over the next two years, Folkes said, she was repeatedly denied opportunities for advancement as a project manager at Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., one of the world’s largest information-technology outsourcing firms. She was offered chances to apply for roles that required her to relocate, but she couldn’t because her mother was ill. Over time, her relationship with the company grew strained, and Folkes said she knows why.

“I definitely knew it was because of me being an American, not being Indian, and also because I was Black,” she said in an interview. Folkes filed an internal discrimination complaint in 2017, three days before she was fired.

In October, a jury in a federal class-action lawsuit returned a verdict that found Cognizant intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022. The verdict, which echoed a previously undisclosed finding from a 2020 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation, centered on discrimination claims based on race and national origin. Cognizant, based in Teaneck, New Jersey, was found to have preferred workers from India, most of whom joined the firm’s US workforce of about 32,000 using skilled-worker visas called H-1Bs.