Akerman LLP has expanded its Labor & Employment Practice Group with partners Angela Hart-Edwards in Washington, D.C., Colin Barnacle in Denver, Denise Gavica Perez in Miami and Rory McEvoy in New York. They work with employers in the healthcare, hospitality and restaurant sectors, among others, the firm said in a release.

“Angela, Colin, Denise and Rory are exceptional lawyers who bolster Akerman’s national strengths in employment litigation and compliance,” said Eric Gordon, chair of Akerman’s Labor & Employment Practice Group. “Employers today are faced with a new set of uncertainties brought on by significant shifts in U.S. employment and immigration policies. The expansion of our team in New York, Denver, Miami and Washington, D.C., advances our ability to problem-solve on the ground with our clients while serving their interests nationally.”

The release continues:

Angela Hart-Edwards
Hart-Edwards is a former Trial Attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. She also served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. She focuses her practice in the areas of employment and civil rights law, government investigations and corporate compliance, and federal sector EEO employment law. With more than 20 years of experience as a trial lawyer, Hart-Edwards represents corporations and their executives in labor and employment related litigation, class/collective actions, agency proceedings, arbitrations and mediations and investigations. She also provides EEO services and defensive federal sector employment litigation services to agencies.

Hart-Edwards regularly advises management on litigation avoidance, negotiates and prepares employment and related agreements, provides human resource and EEO regulatory compliance counseling and training, and serves as corporate diversity counselor. Her clients represent a diverse range of industries including manufacturing, logistics, utilities, higher education institutions, technology, nonprofit, government, healthcare, staffing, retail, and hospitality. She also serves as General Counsel to the Commissioners of the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights and as an advisor to The Council for Federal EEO and Civil Rights Executives.

Colin Barnacle
Barnacle focuses his practice on labor and employment litigation, compliance counseling, corporate governance counseling and investigations, and non-compete and trade secret enforcement. He regularly advises and defends clients in response to the EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), including systemic discrimination investigations and related class actions. He has represented employers in all aspects of employment law before state and federal agencies and courts, including wage and hour collective/class actions under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Title VII discrimination and sexual harassment, as well as actions under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and state workers compensation laws. He is also experienced in Older Workers Benefit Protection Act (OWBPA) compliance, Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) compliance during mass layoffs, and employee-related issues surrounding corporate transactions. Barnacle represents food companies throughout the supply chain, including growers/shippers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and food service businesses.

Barnacle brings years of in-house legal experience having served as Division General Counsel for Americas Fresh Foods, The WhiteWave Foods Company (NYSE: WWAV), a leading consumer packaged food and beverage company, and as Assistant General Counsel for The Gates Corporation, a global diversified manufacturer of industrial and automotive products.

Denise Gavica Perez
Gavica Perez focuses her practice on corporate immigration matters, with a strong emphasis in the healthcare sector. She routinely counsels hospitals seeking to obtain non-immigrant and immigrant visas for employees including physicians, nurses, residents, pharmacists, fellows, medical technologists, as well as staffing agencies tasked with recruiting healthcare professionals. She also has 18 years of practice representing companies within the financial services, technology, sports and entertainment, hospitality, higher-education, construction and engineering sectors.

Gavica Perez regularly provides legal counsel to entrepreneurs and high-net-worth individuals regarding investment-based immigration, including the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, and she advises clients on the full range of immigrant visas, labor certifications, and U.S. citizenship matters. She has experience managing the immigration compliance programs for multinational corporations and institutions engaged in a wide range of activities and industries, including financial services, technology, sports and entertainment, higher-education, construction and engineering. She also has represented companies in connection with Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Form I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification) audits, and Department of Labor/Wage and Hour Division immigration-related investigations.

Rory McEvoy
McEvoy focuses his practice on labor and employment matters, including litigation in federal and state courts and agencies. He routinely handles matters involving collective bargaining, arbitrations, unfair labor practices and union representation proceedings before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). He also represents clients in all aspects of the employment relationship, including non-compete litigation, breach of employment contracts, wage and hour matters and defamation.

McEvoy represents many of New York’s large hospitals and healthcare systems. He also represents clients in other sectors, including financial services, philanthropic religious organizations, technology and educational institutions, among others.

Akerman has welcomed 17 lawyers to its Labor & Employment Practice Group in less than 15 months, expanding nationally with additions in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Orlando and Washington, D.C. Other notable arrivals include Immigration Planning & Compliance Practice Chair Maria Casablanca in Miami; employment litigators Bran Noonan and Sarir Silver in New York, Lillian Chaves Moon in Orlando and Rachel Schumacher in Los Angeles.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

An Above the Law review of a BTI Power Rankings report reports that only 33 percent of general counsel find themselves in a state of “clientopia” with their go-to law firms.

Thr BTI Power Rankings report was based on 960 in-depth telephone interviews that took place between March 2015 and February 2017. Jones Day topped the list.

Law360also reviewed the report: “The biggest area in which law firms are falling short from achieving client service bliss, according to BTI President Michael Rynowecer, is that many have a lack of understanding of their clients’ businesses, something he says is becoming ‘a bigger and bigger problem.’”

Read the Above the Law article.

The Philadelphia Business Journal is reporting that the former general counsel of an New Jersey timeshare consulting service was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiring to obstruct justice in a federal criminal case tried in 2013, federal prosecutors in New Jersey said.

Joshua L. Gayl, 37, was GC of the Vacation Financial, which offered phony consulting services to owners of timeshares, reports Jeff Blumenthal.

Gayl pleaded guilty in March 2016 to a criminal information charging him with one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice.

“Gayl admitted that he misled a witness after learning that the witness told the FBI about being defrauded by VO. Prosecutors said he contacted the witness, hoping to obtain statements favoring the defense at trial. He offered the witness assistance in exchange for the information given to authorities” writes Blumenthal.

Read the Business Journal article.

Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced bills calling for the repeal of a just-announced regulation that would make it easier for consumers to bring class-action lawsuits against banks, reports The Los Angeles Times.

The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule would ban banks and other financial institutions from forcing arbitration clauses on customers to prevent them from bringing or joining class-action suits.

Some Republicans have introduced resolutions calling for use of the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to new regulations created by federal agencies, writes James Rufus Koren.

Read the LA Times article.

The ABA Journal reports that only 1 percent of plaintiffs who file federal job discrimination, harassment and retaliation claims win on the merits at trial, according to an analysis by the Lex Machina legal analytics firm.

The article by Stephen Rynkiewicz discusses Lex Machina’s new employment litigation search and analysis module that covers findings of hostile work environment, retaliation and Title VII issues such as race bias, as well as discrimination based on age, equal rights, military, pregnancy and rehabilitation.

“Lex Machina reviewed nearly 72,000 cases and found that nearly three-fourths them settle, while employers prevail on summary judgment 13 percent of the time,” writes Rynkiewicz. “In more bad news for plaintiffs, only 192 damage awards since 2009 included punitive damages.”

Read the ABA Journal article.

Some former NFL players are receiving pitches for legal help in receiving checks from the league’s legal sports history aimed at retirees who sued for lying about the dangers of concussions suffered by the players.

Ken Belson of The New York Times writes, “Some players may get very little, but others with severe neurological diseases may receive as much as $5 million. Now lawyers, lenders and would-be advisers are circling, pitching their services and trying to get a cut of the money.”

Some of the ex-players with severe neurological disorders are cognitively impaired and may not understand the terms used by the lawyers who make the pitches.

Read the NYT article.

Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, sees Amazon the way some Rust Belt workers see global trade — as a threat to American jobs, reports The Washington Post.

Perrone was planning to file a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that letting Amazon buy Whole Foods would trigger a wave of store closures and eventually quash customer choice, writes the Post‘s Danielle Paquette.

“The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has roughly 1.3 million members across North America, working for retailers at a typical wage of about $18 an hour, including benefits,” according to Paquette. “Members are employed at stores such as Kroger, Safeway and Albertsons. Whole Foods, for contrast, isn’t unionized.”

Read the Post report.

In a New York Times article, the ex-wife of a high-powered Silicon Valley lawyer looks back at the decline and eventual death of her ex-husband — a death caused by a drug addiction that no one else had seen slowly changing his life.

For two years, Eilene Zimmerman created a map of Peter’s descent.

“Human beings are physically and emotionally complex, so there is no simple answer as to why Peter began abusing drugs,” she writes. “But as a picture of his struggle took shape before my eyes, so did another one: The further I probed, the more apparent it became that drug abuse among America’s lawyers is on the rise and deeply hidden.”

Read the NYT article.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will become law in all EU jurisdictions on May 25, 2018 and will impact organizations that handle EU citizen data for any number of reasons, from employment to customer relations to marketing. Just because a company is not based in or even operating in the EU doesn’t mean GDPR won’t apply.

It is a broad and wide-ranging regulation that is posing significant challenges for the types of clients Yerra serves, namely global corporations in highly-regulated industries such as banking, consumer goods and pharmaceuticals.

To gauge readiness for GDPR across industries and global regions, Yerra has launched an industry survey to help benchmark where global corporations are in their preparations. The GDPR Reality Check survey is being run in collaboration with the Blickstein Group and will be open for submissions through the end of May 2017.

Take the survey.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

On the heels of Volkswagen announcing moves toward electrifying its vehicle fleet, and Tesla beginning its production run of its highly anticipated Model 3, several other recent developments show momentum continuing to build toward the replacement of fossil fuels with electricity to power the cars of the future, reports Foley & Lardner.

The article by Jason P. Britt discusses France’s plan to ban the sale of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040, and Volvo electrifying its fleet.

“Even as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have shown a souring appetite for a global approach to the economy in some sectors, these developments reinforce just how international the auto industry is and will continue to be,” Britt writes.

Read the article.

During the 2017 CLOC Annual Legal Operations Institute in Las Vegas, Onit and PayPal presented a session titled, “Next Generation Enterprise Legal Management (ELM): People. Process. Automation.” The speakers were Lauren Giammona, Director of Operations, Business Affairs & Legal at PayPal, and Eric M. Elfman, founder and CEO of Onit.

Lauren outlined her implementation experience and shared her 7 key tips for selecting an enterprise legal management (ELM) vendor. Legaltech News wrote a detailed article summarizing the CLOC session. PayPal and Onit discussed how legal departments can provide “continuous” value to the company, drive operational improvements and allow employees to work in the systems they prefer. The session highlighted:

• The importance of process, workflow and collaboration
• How a business automation tool solves needs beyond e-billing and matter management
• Key benchmarks and metrics that drive innovation and transformation in legal operations

Download the case study.

When drafting contracts, briefs, and other documents, the significance of placing a comma is often overlooked, points out Hyatt & Weber P.A. The decision to include or omit a comma, however, could be dispositive in a dispute over the meaning of legislation or a contract.

“Indeed, in O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, 851 F.3d 69 (1st Cir. 2017), the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found the absence of a comma created an ambiguity when interpreting certain legislation, and that ambiguity drove the outcome of the litigation,” according to a post of the firm’s website.

“Guiding principles regarding the use of commas and other writing conventions should be strongly considered when drafting contracts, for example, as including or excluding a comma in a particular contract provision may ultimately determine whether a company owes or is owed millions of dollars in a subsequent dispute,” the post continues.

Read the article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

Although it is typical for AIA form contracts to contain arbitration clauses, as a contractor you should consider whether you should have an arbitration clause in your construction agreement, advises Paul W. Norris of Stark & Stark.

In an article posted on the New Jersey Law Blog, Norris explains “there are numerous factors to consider in determining whether mandatory arbitration is the preferred dispute resolution mechanism, or whether the state court system is preferred. Although arbitration may have some advantages, there are also disadvantages which must be considered rather than simply adopting the AIA form.”

He discusses the cost of the arbitration proceeding, judge or jury vs. an arbitrator, discovery during an arbitration process vs. the state court process, timeliness of the proceeding, judgments, and appeals from arbitration of a state court.

Read the article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

A federal judge sentenced disgraced former disability lawyer Eric C. Conn to 12 years in prison Friday even though Conn is a fugitive, according to a report in the Lexington Herald-Leader.

U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves imposed the sentence in absentia against Conn in federal court in Lexington, KY. The 12-year sentence was the maximum for the two charges covered in a plea deal that was in place.

Reporter Bill Estep writes that Conn, 56, was once one of the top disability lawyers in the country, representing thousands of people in successful claims for benefits from the Social Security Administration and making millions in fees. But then in March Conn pleaded guilty to stealing from the government and paying illegal gratuities to a Social Security judge.

The conspiracy outlined by Conn included using false evidence of clients’ physical or mental disabilities in their claims. Some doctors were paid to sign forms with little scrutiny, and Conn bribed the Social Security judge to approve claims.

Read the Herald-Leader article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

Navex Global will present a complimentary webinar outlining the state of compliance training in 2017. The event will be Thursday, July 27, 2017, at 10 a.m. Pacific time/1 p.m. Eastern time.

“Employee compliance training is intended to create great culture – yet we are still seeing company after company in the headlines because of bad corporate culture,” Navex says on its website. “So where’s the disconnect?”

The webinar will address such questions as:

• What are advanced organizations doing to break through and help create an ethical culture through training?

• What issues threaten training effectiveness?

• How do I gain executive buy-in and decrease employee cynicism?

• How are companies measuring the ROI of training?

The presentation also will include benchmark data compiled from almost a thousand practitioners’ feedback about their training efforts.

Register for the webinar.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

Just days after approving a controversial rule that will make it much easier for Americans to sue their banks, the U.S.’s top consumer watchdog is already fighting back against attempts to prevent the regulation from taking effect, reports Bloomberg.

Bloomberg’s Elizabeth Dexheimer reports that Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray said there is “no basis” to claims that his agency’s action will put the nation’s financial system at risk. Cordray was responding to concerns raised by acting Comptroller of the Currency Keith Noreika, a regulator appointed by the Trump administration who had a long legal career representing banks.

Under the new rule, financial firms are restricted from forcing consumers to resolve their disputes through arbitration, a practice that has been used by the industry for years to keep grievances tied to payday loans, credit cards and other products out of courts.

Read the Bloomberg article.

The Washington Post is reporting that Marc E. Kasowitz, President Trump’s longtime attorney representing him in the Russia investigations, reportedly sent angry, threatening and profane emails to a stranger who criticized him this week. In one email, he told the man, “I already know where you live, I’m on you.”

A Kasowitz spokesman did not dispute the account, which was reported Thursday by the independent nonprofit journalism site ProPublica. The spokesman said Kasowitz regretted his words and that the email “came at the end of a very long day that at 10 p.m. was not yet over,” writes Derek Hawkins.

The exchange began after a “Rachel Maddow Show” broadcast that discussed how Kasowitz had made the unusual decision not to seek a security clearance to handle the Russia case. The man sent an email to Kasowitz witht eh subject line, “Resign Now.”

Read the Post‘s article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

President Donald Trump’s effort to reshape influential U.S. courts by stocking them with conservative judges faces at least one significant impediment, reports Reuters: some of the courts best placed to thwart his agenda have liberal majorities that are likely to stay in place in the short-term.

“Those courts, including an influential Washington appeals court and two appellate courts that ruled against Trump in cases involving his travel ban, all had an influx of fresh liberal blood under President Barack Obama,” writes Lawrence Hurley.

Hurley explains that in Obama’s eight years in office, he was able to make enough appointments to leave a strong liberal imprint on the federal courts. At the end of his second term, nine of the 13 federal appeals courts had a majority of Democratic-appointed judges.

Read the Reuters article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

A Canadian digital currency exchange (QuadrigaCX) reported recently that a malfunction in a smart contract is responsible for a $14 million dollar loss of the cryptocurrency ether, reports Jared Butcher in the Steptoe Blockchain Blog.

He explains that a software upgrade performed by the company had an error in the code that prevented the smart contract from properly processing incoming amounts of the cryptocurrency Ether. During the time it took to discover the problem, Ether sent to the company’s exchange was “trapped” in the smart contract.

“The potential for new risks and severe consequences arising from smart contracts (compared to traditional contracts) suggests that a re-consideration of indemnification strategies is warranted,” Butcher writes. “Risks arising from coding errors or other human errors are not the product of intentional wrongdoing or a catastrophic event and may not involve any injury to a third party.”

Read the article.

In a blog post on nondisclosure agreements, Gregory W. McClune of Foley & Lardner addresses the questions: Does an employer have the legal means to prevent disclosure of information acquired during employment? Likewise, can an employer seek legal redress for such disclosures?

“Drafting and enforcing NDAs requires considerable thought, care, continual maintenance and a skilled legal advisor,” writes McClune. “It is an area rife with risks and traps; and employers who believe they can “gag” their employees, by simply requiring them to sign a broadly worded agreement with heavy penalties, may be in for a rude shock.”

His article discusses difficulties as dealing with the lack of uniformity among states in enforcing NDAs, and the lack of sympathy for employers in the courts.

Read the article.