Employees pursuing wrongful termination and discrimination claims have a duty to mitigate damages by making reasonable efforts to find comparable substitute employment; they are not required to accept any job, only one that is substantially equivalent in terms of pay, status, and working conditions. Rejecting a genuinely comparable offer, or failing to make any reasonable job-search effort at all, can reduce or eliminate the back pay and front pay otherwise available.

The burden of proving a failure to mitigate rests on the employer, not the employee, and requires the employer to show both that the plaintiff failed to exercise reasonable diligence and that comparable positions were actually available during the relevant period. A plaintiff is not required to accept a demeaning or substantially different position, take on a lengthy commute far beyond what was previously required, or otherwise settle for work that is not genuinely comparable, and courts give plaintiffs meaningful latitude in defining what counts as reasonable diligence.

Because mitigation is a defense the employer must affirmatively prove rather than a burden resting on the plaintiff, a case's ultimate damages exposure often depends heavily on the strength of the employer's own labor-market evidence, not merely on the plaintiff's job-search diary. In Juricratic, the mitigation offset is modeled as an employer-side evidentiary dial distinct from the underlying damages calculation, reflecting that weak comparable-position evidence from the employer leaves the full back pay and front pay figures largely intact even where the plaintiff's own search effort looks thin.

Employers build a mitigation defense with concrete evidence of comparable available positions during the relevant period, often through labor-market or vocational expert testimony, since a bare assertion that the plaintiff did not try hard enough rarely succeeds without that comparative evidence. Plaintiffs document their job search thoroughly, including applications submitted, interviews attended, and any unemployment benefit filings, to preempt a mitigation challenge.