On May 28, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court settled a question that had divided the state’s appellate courts for years.
When an employee reports conduct they believe is illegal and later faces retaliation, is it enough that they reasonably believed the conduct violated the law?
The Court’s answer in Gessner v. Southern Company was no.
To prevail under Florida’s private-sector Whistleblower’s Act, an employee must show that the conduct they opposed was actually unlawful. A sincere belief, even a reasonable one, is not enough.
One important nuance is easy to miss. The Court did not hold that the illegal act must already be completed. An employee who refuses to carry out an unlawful instruction may still be protected even if the employer never follows through. The key distinction is that the conduct itself must genuinely violate the law. It is not enough that it merely appears unlawful to the employee raising the concern.
The Court has spoken. The question for leadership is what to do with that reality.
What the Ruling Establishes
The decision eliminates a genuine inconsistency. Before Gessner, an employee’s likelihood of success could depend heavily on which Florida appellate district heard the case. Some courts applied an actual violation standard. Others accepted a good-faith, reasonable belief standard. The Florida Supreme Court resolved that split and established a uniform rule.
The Court’s reasoning was rooted in statutory interpretation rather than policy. Florida’s public-sector whistleblower statute expressly protects reports of suspected violations of law. The private-sector statute at issue in Gessner does not. The Court concluded that when the Legislature wanted to extend protection to suspected violations, it knew how to do so explicitly. That distinction largely explains the outcome.
There is clear logic behind the decision. Courts are reluctant to impose liability based solely on an employee’s subjective interpretation of complex legal requirements. Requiring an actual violation creates a clearer and more objective standard.
From a legal perspective, that is understandable. From a management perspective, it raises a question that the opinion does not address.
The Management Challenge the Ruling Creates
Most employees are not lawyers.
When they raise a concern about safety, ethics, discrimination, accounting practices, product quality, or regulatory compliance, they are rarely performing statutory analysis. They are reporting observations, not issuing legal opinions. They are reacting to something that looks wrong, and they are doing so with incomplete information because they can see only a small part of the system.
Yet under Gessner, an employee’s protection may ultimately depend on whether their legal conclusion was correct.
For employers, that reality creates an important management challenge. Employees rarely possess the information necessary to make definitive legal judgments. The question for leadership is whether employees remain willing to surface concerns when they are uncertain whether those concerns rise to the level of an actual violation.
Effective organizations recognize that the value of reporting systems is not that every concern proves legally correct. The value is that concerns enter the system early, when they can be evaluated, investigated, and addressed by people with the expertise to assess them. A reporting culture that only surfaces issues after employees are certain they have identified a legal violation is likely to surface problems later, not sooner.
The goal, therefore, is not to encourage legal conclusions from employees. It is to encourage information flow.
The Real Cost of a Weak Reporting Culture
Many employers will read Gessner and focus on reduced litigation exposure. That may be a fair short-term read.
But litigation was never the primary function of internal reporting. The purpose of reporting systems is information. Organizations need employees to surface problems while they are still manageable: a safety concern, an ethics issue, a policy failure, a quality-control breakdown, or a manager exercising poor judgment.
Most of these concerns never become lawsuits. The value lies in discovering them early enough that they never have to.
When information stops flowing upward, leadership loses visibility into operational reality. Problems that might have been identified and corrected internally remain hidden until they become more difficult, more expensive, and more public. By the time leadership becomes aware of them, the opportunity for a quiet internal fix is often already gone. Concerns that might have been resolved in a staff meeting find their way elsewhere instead.
Organizations rarely fail because they have too much information. They fail because critical information never reaches decision-makers.
The Difference Between Compliance and Trust
In The Inside Advantage, I argue that many organizations mistake legal compliance for organizational health. They are not the same thing.
Compliance establishes minimum requirements.
Trust determines whether people will tell you what you need to know.
The difference plays out clearly in two cases I examine in the book.
In September 2025, Nestlé dismissed CEO Laurent Freixe after an internal investigation confirmed he had engaged in an undisclosed relationship with a direct report. The board learned of the issue through the company’s Speak Up hotline. A concern was raised, received, investigated, and acted upon.
Contrast that with the experience of food safety scientist Yasmine Motarjemi, who spent years raising concerns about food safety practices and organizational decision-making at Nestlé. Formal reporting structures existed. Her concerns stalled anyway, not because the channel was absent, but because the organizational infrastructure behind it had broken down. She was ultimately pushed out while the concerns she raised went unaddressed.
One concern moved through the system. One stalled inside it.
The difference was not legal protection.
The difference was organizational infrastructure.
What Leaders Should Do Now
The employers most affected by Gessner will not necessarily be those facing the highest legal risk. They will be the ones that have quietly mistaken compliance programs for feedback systems. The organizations where reporting mechanisms exist primarily to manage liability. The organizations where employees already hesitate before raising concerns. The organizations where trust is thin and psychological safety is fragile.
For those employers, the ruling increases the importance of building trust through means other than legal protection.
By contrast, organizations that have already built genuine trust may notice very little change. Their employees are not reporting concerns because they have researched whistleblower statutes. They report because experience has taught them that management wants the information, investigates fairly, and does not penalize people for raising concerns in good faith.
That kind of culture is not created by legislation.
It is created by leadership.
The Inside Advantage
The Florida Supreme Court answered a legal question.
The management question remains: How do organizations ensure that accurate information reaches decision-makers before problems become crises?
The answer has never been found in a statute. It is found in the systems that make reporting reliable, the managers who know how to receive difficult information, and the trust that allows information to move upward before small problems become large ones.
The companies most vulnerable to future crises will not be those that lose retaliation lawsuits. They will be the ones that never hear the warning in the first place because their systems failed to surface it.
The inside advantage was never the legal standard.
It was the system you built before the warning arrived.
The Inside Advantage 
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