Articles Discussing Topics Regarding The Practice Of Labor And Employment Law.

A Primer (Reminder) for Lead (and other) Paralegals

Litigation generates a ton of paper – pleadings, motions, drafts, correspondence, legal research – and these materials do not simply vanish once your involvement with a case has ended.

Moonlighting is the practice of working for more than one employer or working for yourself while working for an employer. Professionals who moonlight may be asking for trouble. Many employers have policies forbidding the practice, some going so far as to deem it grounds for immediate termination. A recent case provides an extreme example of moonlighting at its worst.

Apologies to John Steinbeck, but in some ways, both 2013 and 2014 have been the winters of FLSA plaintiffs’ discontent on the East Coast. Last summer, the Second Circuit (which covers New York, Connecticut, and Vermont) issued a number of decisions tightening pleading standards under the Supreme Court’s decisions in Iqbal and Twombly. In one of those cases, Lundy v. Catholic Health System of Long Island, the court held that “in order to state a plausible FLSA overtime claim, a plaintiff must sufficiently allege [forty] hours of work in a given workweek as well as some uncompensated time in excess of the [forty] hours.” In Lundy and other cases, the Second Circuit affirmed dismissals because the plaintiffs had failed to provide any facts or estimates to support the number of hours they worked and had simply “rephrased” the FLSA’s requirements as factual contentions.

Executive Summary: A federal trial court in D.C. recently dismissed the Amended Complaint of a former professor at the University of the District of Columbia (“UDC” or “University”) due to his failure to timely oppose a Motion to Dismiss, finding that the plaintiff’s counsel’s reasons for the failure to timely respond to the motion did not rise to the level of “excusable neglect” under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 6(b)(1).

Internal investigations play a lead role in a company’s effective ethics and compliance program. They are one of the best ways for a company to detect, thoroughly understand, and remedy situations that may violate its code of conduct, and they provide a business-friendly solution before misconduct or non-compliance grows deeper or wider.

Tweet with caution. It only takes 140 characters for professionals to embarrass themselves or worse. Social media has many advantages.

On November 4, 2013, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California denied a motion filed by a company to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a former Libya-based employee. This decision ended the company’s unsuccessful attempts to remove to the Libyan judicial system a complaint filed in U.S. federal courts. The ruling, and a companion decision issued two months earlier, serves as a reminder of the need to include well-crafted forum selection clauses in employment agreements, particularly in the international context.