Client Alerts
Client Alerts
1264 items, 20 items per page
- Earlier this week, Judge Amy Totenberg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia imposed significant monetary sanctions against a pair of relators who blatantly and repeatedly violated the seal order in a pending qui tam action, United States ex rel. Bibby v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., Case No. 1:06-CV-0547-AT.
- On December 19, 2014 Governor Kasich signed Am. Sub. H.B. 5 (the Bill) into law thus concluding three years of contentious lobbying between selected trade associations on one side of the debate (primarily The Ohio Chamber of Commerce, The Ohio Society of CPAs and The National Federation of Independent Business) and Ohio’s roughly 600 municipalities on the other side of the debate.
- On December 15, 2014, the United States Supreme Court decided that a party seeking to remove a class action to federal court need not include evidence of the amount in controversy as part of its petition for removal. Instead, the party seeking removal need only plausibly state that the amount at stake exceeds $5 million. The case is Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. LLC v. Owens, 574 U.S. ---, 2014 U.S. LEXIS 8435 (2014).
- Members of the 130th Ohio General Assembly officially finished their business and headed home after the conclusion of a lengthy Ohio House floor session December 17. The hectic final days were notable both for the legislation that passed as well as for some high profile bills that did not pass.
- Effective January 1, 2015, employers with facilities located in states subject to federal OSHA jurisdiction will have new reporting requirements. Previously, employers were required to report all work related fatalities and work related hospitalizations of three or more employees within eight hours of the event.
- Both the West Coast (led by San Francisco) and the East Coast (led by Philadelphia) recently illustrated growing pro-employee trends in defining employee work schedules and in ensuring paid sick leave for employees.
- In several previous blog posts, we have mentioned obtaining court orders with the aim of getting links to harmful content, such as Ripoff Report posts, de-indexed from search engines. What we have not written about, to date, is how to use a court order to get links removed from Google.
- Last Friday, the NLRB issued its long-anticipated “ambush election” or “quickie election” rules. The rulemaking, which followed a long and tortured procedural path, is a major overhaul of the procedures used to conduct secret ballot, union elections. These elections are an important path to union representation, and they will now occur more quickly after the election petition is filed.
- Since 2007, as a result of the NLRB’s Register Guard decision, an employer could lawfully limit the use of its email system by employees for certain non-business related activities, assuming that it applied the rule non-discriminatorily. On December 10, 2014, in a 3-2 decision, the NLRB reversed the old rule established in Register Guard and established a new rule. Now, employees must be permitted to use employer email for statutorily protected communications during nonworking time if they have access to employer computer systems for work.
- People today love sharing photographs of themselves and their whereabouts. And today’s technology makes it so easy. While there are numerous websites and apps that make this possible, among the most popular are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This trio ranks second, eighth, and twenty-fourth, respectively on Alexa.com’s rankings of top websites in the United States.
- As we reported in October, the case of Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, U.S. No. 13-433, has been closely watched by companies that screen their workers to prevent employee theft. Integrity Staffing required its employees to pass through a security check at the end of each shift and did not compensate them for the 25 minutes the employees claimed the process took.
- Eighteen states and the District of Columbia currently protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees (LGBT). In July 2014, President Obama issued Executive Order 13672, which extended this protection by prohibiting discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal contracts.
- According to a recent Department of Justice press release regarding annual False Claims Act (FCA) recoveries, FCA recoveries continue to skyrocket, in keeping with the trend in recent years. 2014 marks the third straight year in which the Department of Justice has announced a record-setting annual recovery.
- The use of independent contractors in the oil and gas industry is typical and its advantages are obvious. However, decisions about when and how to use independent contractors might be made without full consideration of potential problems or the ever-looming and potentially significant risks of misclassification.
- Led by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), federal agencies are beginning to focus on sexual orientation, gender identity and transgender discrimination. While the proposed federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which has been introduced in every Congress since 1994, is unlikely to gain traction in the new Republican-controlled Congress, the EEOC and Department of Labor (DOL) have made lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues an enforcement priority.
- On November 26, 2014, U.S. EPA proposed a more stringent national ambient air quality standard for ozone. The Clean Air Act requires U.S. EPA to establish two air quality standards for ozone: a primary standard, to protect public health with an “adequate margin of safety”; and a secondary standard, to protect the public welfare. U.S. EPA’s proposal reduces the current primary and secondary ozone standard of 75 parts per billion (ppb) to a level that is proposed to be between 65 and 70 ppb.
- On November 20, 2014, President Obama announced a number of executive actions (also known as the Immigration Accountability Executive Actions). One of the executive actions focused on policies supporting U.S. high-skilled businesses and workers. A link to this executive action can be found here. In this action, President Obama directs new policies and regulations that will support our country’s high-skilled businesses and workers by improving the ability of U.S. businesses to hire and retain highly skilled foreign-born workers, while also providing the workers with increased flexibility to make natural advancements with their current employers or seek similar opportunities elsewhere.
- Even the best businesses cannot always keep every customer, employee, business partner, or other party happy at all times. Unfortunately, in this day and age, many of these disgruntled parties will choose to take their complaints public by posting disparaging information or content about a company online, which can cause significant damage.
- The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently issued a decision reaffirming its much-maligned 2012 D.R. Horton opinion. In D.R. Horton, the NLRB held that an employer could not require employees to resolve employment-related claims through individual arbitrations, thereby waiving their right to proceed in a collective or class action.
- On November 13, 2014, Ohio EPA issued draft amendments to the rules in OAC Chapter 3745-31 governing the Permit-to-Install New Sources and Permit-to-Install and Operate Program, including a new permit-by-rule (PBR) provision for emissions from horizontal well completion operations (OAC 3745-31-03(C)(2)(m)).