Merrill DataSite has posted a complimentary white paper titled “Contract management and business needs: Finding the driving business need in your company.”

The white paper addresses what it will take to finally convince senior management that it’s time to take action. One step is to identify the driving business need in your organization – the next is to demonstrate how improved contract management can support that business need.

What’s tricky is that executives don’t always articulate that driving business need directly. But you can identify it by picking up cues – in executive decisions, priorities and company culture, Merrill DataSite says.

Download the white paper.

A new rule issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will significantly increase the type of injuries that must be reported to the agency.

A report in The National Law Review says that the new rule will require employers to notify OSHA of any workplace fatalities within eight hours and to report all hospitalizations, plus any injuries that result in amputations or loss of an eye within 24 hours.

The rule will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2015, for workplaces under federal OSHA jurisdiction, The National Law Review reports. OSHA is encouraging States with OSHA-approved job safety and health programs to implement the new requirements by the same date, but employers will need to verify State plan changes or contact legal counsel for more information.

Read the story.

Bloomberg News is reporting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating whether mandatory retirement provisions at Deloitte LLP violate federal employment law. The investigation could have an impact on law firms that have mandatory retirement ages for their parters.

According to Bloomberg, Ronald Cooper, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP who was a general counsel of the EEOC, said that while it’s impossible to predict the outcome, “the EEOC will probably say that a giant operation that calls itself a partnership where individuals have little or nothing to say about the way the business is conducted isn’t likely to be viewed as an old-style partnership of three or four members.”

As a result, those firms could face liability under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act for forcing out partners of a certain age.

Read the story.

The National Basketball Association players association has hired Gary Kohlman as its new general counsel, according to a report in The New York Times.

Kohlman was lead trial lawyer at the Washington firm Bredhoff & Kaiser, where he represented the Service Employees International Union and the United Steelworkers.

In February, he argued in front of the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of Northwestern’s scholarship football players, who sought the right to form a union, The Times reported. The N.L.R.B.’s regional director ruled in favor of the players. Kohlman also worked with the Major League Baseball players union after the 1994 strike.

Read the story.

The Advanced Technology Environmental and Energy Center has posted a free on-demand webinar discussing the importance of renewable energy sources, specifically wind, ocean and geothermal.

The webinar was a part of the Sustainable Energy Education and Training (SEET) project, a series of free webinars developed by SEET energy technology instructors.

Presenters discussed current and future energy challenges of using renewable sources of energy, including population growth, overconsumption, and problems with finite fossil fuel sources.

The discussion also covered the basics and outlook for the various types of renewables.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Engineering News-Record presents a complimentary on-demand webinar designed to provide a roadmap for arriving at a high-performance building team capable of the collaboration and innovation necessary to compete.

“Help has arrived for building teams that are itching to collaborate using conventional project delivery models—and contracts—rather than risk-and-reward-sharing integrated project delivery,” Engineering News-Record says on it website.

Speakers in the webinar are contributors to a new e-book titled “Advanced Integrated Practice: Create a Culture of Deep Collaboration,” published recently by the Alliance for Construction Excellence.

Speakers will describe all of the features, principles and practices necessary to implement AIP on projects.  They will lay out the somewhat intimidating changes in corporate culture required to fully implement AIP.  For this, they will offer techniques to use to immediately to manage scope, cost, schedule, quality and safety.  They will also present tools to prepare for enhanced performance.

Register for the on-demand webinar.

Sanofi is one of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies,has fired CEO Christopher A. Viehbacher amid tensions over the company’s international strategy.

The New York Times reported that Serge Weinberg, the chairman, will serve as chief executive until a replacement is found.

Viehbacher focused the French company more on international business. He also was a major force in Sanofi’s embrace of biotechnology, helping engineer the takeover of Genzyme, an American biotechnology company, for $20.1 billion — a deal widely seen as a success for Sanofi.

That acquisition gave Sanofi a presence in the Boston area, a hot spot for pharmaceutical research because of the universities and biotechnology companies there. He made efforts to shift more of Sanofi’s research there and personally moved to Boston this year, the Times reported.

But those actions led to dissatisfaction among labor unions and some government officials in France, who were concerned about a loss of jobs in their country.

Read the story.

The Internet has become so integral to economic and national life that government, business, and individual users are targets for ever-more frequent and threatening attacks, Pew Research reports.

The organization canvassed thousands of experts and Internet builders to share their predictions. (Pew Research called this a canvassing because it is not a representative, randomized survey.)

Its findings emerge from an “opt in” invitation to experts, many of whom play active roles in Internet evolution as technology builders, researchers, managers, policymakers, marketers, and analysts.

One of thekey themes coming from the study was that the Internet is a critical infrastructure for national defense activities, energy resources, banking/finance, transportation, and essential daily-life pursuits for billions of people. “The tools already exist to mount cyber attacks now and they will improve in coming years—but countermeasures will improve, too,” Pew Research reports.

Read the report.

Stephen Dwyer, general counsel for the American Staffing Association, had a blunt warning for staffing companies and employers hiring temporary workers: “OSHA is on the lookout. You are going to be much more susceptible in terms of your contracts with staffing agencies and training for temporary workers,” when he spoke to the Safety Leadership Conference recently.

Dwyer told the conference that OSHA will be examining the contracts between companies that hire contract workers and the staffing companies that supply them, the hazard assessments that are conducted for workplaces staffed with temporary workers and the general safety and site-specific training provided to temporary workers, reports EHS Today.

Ed Foulke,  a partner in Fisher & Phillips, also addressed the conference. He told of one of his clients who drew OSHA scrutiny of safety for temporary workers after a temp was killed on the job two hours into his shift on the first day of work.

Read the story.

Chubb Corp. distanced itself from insurance adjusters in Sudan and Syria after a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into business in nations blacklisted by the U.S. because of terrorism ties, Bloomberg is reporting.

In a letter to the SEC, the insurer categorized third-party adjusters who examine marine claims as “surveyors” rather than “representatives.” Chubb said that while it doesn’t sell coverage in Sudan or Syria, it has people available there in case they are needed by clients with multinational operations.

“The company is strongly committed to compliance with U.S. economic sanction laws,” Maureen Brundage, Chubb’s general counsel, wrote. Warren, New Jersey-based Chubb doesn’t have any “operations, employees or agents” in Sudan and Syria and hasn’t made payments to entities in either country, she said.

Read the story.

iCONECT Development LLC will present a complimentary webinar on Thursday, Nov. 13, at 1 p.m. EST to discuss iCONECT-XERA’s new Predictive Review.

Featuring enhanced advanced analytics, including Predictive Review, the latest version of iCONECT-XERA® continues the focus on workflow simplicity. iCONECT-XERA will support multiple defensible predictive review workflows, automating tedious tasks and helping ensure no critical steps are missed.

Presenters will highlight enhancements to the analytics features and benefits of iCONECT-XERA, including:

• How to simplify the review process by applying predictive coding without requiring subject matter experts to identify training documents (seeds).
• Best practices that reduce review time by utilizing SmartSample®, which automates and expedites the identification of sample training documents, allowing projects to commence with minimal project management effort and considerably reducing the number of iterations.
• Ways to leverage the iVIEW® Data Visualizer to easily understand charts and graphs that provide extensive metrics, such as Precision and Recall, through the life of the project.
• Techniques to set and achieve the various goals of your review using the latest in predictive review technology.

Register for the webinar.

The legal and regulatory terrain has gotten rougher, says Deloitte in a white paper, yet the general counselmust not only keep up, but stay ahead. “Trying to do so with the frameworks, thinking, and tools of the past can be frustrating. It  is may be time to update, to move from giving your organization a sense of direction to providing more guidance and leadership in this area,” the paper continues.

Deloitte’s white paper, The Risk Intelligent General Counsel, provides a fresh perspective on legal and regulatory risk governance and management. This Risk Intelligent perspective recognizes the need to view these risks across organizational silos and to understand their potential impact on the finances, reputation, and future of the business.

Read the white paper.

Compliance and legal challenges are converging, offering opportunity for general counsel to play a more strategic role across the enterprise, reports a new white paper from Mitratech.

The report is titled “At the Intersection of Legal and Compliance: The Opportunity for General Counsel to Meet Increasingly Complex Compliance Requirements and Lower Business Risk.”

As compliance demands expand in both quantity and financial impact, compliance and regulatory issues are at the forefront as a top priority for general counsel, although the role that they play in this function is still evolving, Mitratech says.

“There is a clear opportunity for General Counsel to embrace their role as a change agent within the enterprise and to take a leadership position at the intersection of legal and compliance challenges,” said Martin Goulet, Mitratech’s Senior Product Manager for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solutions.

Read the white paper.

Fortune has posted a detailed examination of how former Home Depot CEO Frank Blake took ownership of the company’s customer data breach in the latter days of his tenure and, in the process, cemented his reputation as a straight-shooter.

According to Fortune‘s report, “Blake’s response to the breakdown matches his approach to running Home Depot—an approach few foresaw when the board abruptly named him to replace Bob Nardelli in 2007. He tackled the hack with the same forthrightness, humor, and humility that he has displayed in reviving Home Depot.”

Some other companies have suffered greatly after similar disasters, but “Home Depot has shown no public signs of a decline. That is in part because it was the first of several hacking episodes to occur in rapid succession. But it is also because of Blake’s forthright approach,” the article says.

Read the story.

A webinar hosted by Financial Recovery Technologies, LLC (FRT), emphasized that institutions have a strong fiduciary duty to actively track securities litigation.

The webinar is now available for on-demand viewing.

A panel comprised of past and present legal representatives from several leading U.S. pension funds discussed how institutions have a strong fiduciary duty to actively track securities litigation, in the U.S. and across the globe. The expert panelists shared their funds’ experiences in being active participants in securities litigation.

The discussion also addressed how funds should assess damages in order to make informed decisions about becoming active, what funds should consider before becoming active, and what impact being an active participant may have on an institution.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions has posted a complimentary webinar designed to help utility managers address issues across the water-energy nexus.

In the webinar, Dr. Craig Zamuda from the Department of Energy (DOE) presents key findings from DOE’s recently released water/energy nexus report, attempting to distill some of the key issues and risks of which water and electric utilities should be aware.

Dr. Kristen Averyt, Associate Director for Science for the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and Director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado, presents her research regarding water-energy challenges that exist currently and are on the horizon.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Revitas presents a complimentary webinar on effective contract management.

Getting the final signatures and filing the contract has always been viewed as the end of the contract management process. But the reality is that true contract management really begins at that point, Revitas says on its website.

For this webinar Revitas teams up with IACCM to explore why effective management of the ongoing life of a contract is essential to corporate success and strategic growth, and why the old “sign and file” mentality could be detrimental to your business.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Bloomberg Government has posted a free webinar on dealing with OASIS multiple-award contracts (MACs), expected to become the largest professional services program in the federal government.

In late May, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced the final awardees on their long-awaited OASIS contracts. OASIS offers opportunities worth $60 billion in task orders during the next decade, but with significant uncertainty in the market, Bloomberg Government says.

Bloomberg Government, in partnership with the Coalition for Government Procurement, presents this free webinar that previews the structure, scope and competitive landscape on OASIS.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Clearwater Compliance will present a free webinar on the current requirements of the HIPAA Security Final Rule for documentation and Policies and Procedures as well as how to actually design and develop security and privacy policies and procedures.

The webinar will be Thursday, Nov. 20, at 11 a.m. Central time.

Any HIPAA audit or investigations are sure to include close review of privacy and security policies and procedures.  This webinar is designed to teach how to get them in place and operational quickly, Clearwater Compliance said on its website.

Register for the webinar.

General Motors has announced the upcoming retirement of its general counsel, Michael P. Millikin.

In its report on the retirement, The New York Times said Millikin has been a central figure in the automaker’s safety crisis and a target of congressional critics calling for broad reforms at the nation’s largest automaker.

Millikin joined the company in 1977 and has been its general counsel for five years. He is expected to retire early next year.

“While G.M.’s internal investigation exonerated him in the delayed recall, Mr. Millikin could still be a subject of federal and state inquiries into the company’s handling of defective ignition switches that can cause vehicles to lose power suddenly and disable air bags,” The Times reported.

Read the story.