Goldman Sachs and Dell Technologies will pay a combination of almost $17 million to settle separate Labor Department allegations of pay bias based on gender and race, reports Bloomberg Law.

“Both Goldman Sachs and Dell-EMC agreed to nationwide ‘early resolution’ agreements, whereby their compliance will be routinely monitored in exchange for five years free of random OFCCP audits,” explains Bloomberg’s Paige Smith. “These are at least the fourth and fifth ‘early resolution’ agreements with the agency, joining those with Bank of America, Performance Food Group, Cintas Corp., and US Foods Inc. ”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

Over the past few decades, Republican and Democratic administrations have increasingly leaned on deferred prosecution agreements in corporate criminal cases and non-prosecution agreements to settle allegations against corporations, according to a Washington Post report.

For example, JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, has repeatedly resolved federal investigations over the last eight years by striking a deal: It wouldn’t be prosecuted as long as it stayed out of trouble, writes the Post‘s Renae Merle.

“This comes at a time when the Trump administration is prosecuting fewer white-collar crimes,” she explains. “The number of cases brought against corporations fell to 99 last year, compared with 181 in 2015, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most were against small companies, 62.9 percent employed fewer than 50 workers, the commission reported.”

Read the Post article.

Taxpayers lose billions each year in royalties generated from oil and gas leases on public lands while fossil fuel developers reap profits at their expense, but Democrats have pushed legislation that would overhaul leasing laws that have not been updated in a century, reports Courthouse News Service.

For the eighth consecutive year, the Government Accountability Office placed the Interior Department’s oil and gas leasing program on its high risk list of federal programs mottled with waste, fraud and abuse.

That report found that “Interior’s methods to determine and collect royalties hasn’t been updated since 1920, and with the coal, gas and oil industry in far different shape today than it was a century ago, the time to develop a system that meets energy needs while delivering fair market returns is long overdue,” writes Courthouse News’ Brandi Buchman.

Read the Courthouse News article.

For nearly seven years, a small South Carolina law firm allegedly helped operate a nationwide scheme that authorities say preyed on desperate military veterans, misled investors and netted millions of dollars in profit, reports The Post and Courier of Charleston.

The Upstate Law Group, owned by Candy Kern-Fuller, allegedly worked with a network of salesmen to lure in cash-strapped veterans and persuade them to sign over their monthly pensions and disability payments, according to Post and Courier reporter Andrew Brown.

The businesses then persuaded retirees to invest in the federal benefit payments, promising up to an 8 percent return on their money. Participating veterans received a lump-sum payout for handing over several years of future income to the investors.

“The problem is the entire arrangement is illegal, according to state and federal authorities. Federal law prohibits veterans from assigning their pension or disability payments to another person,” Brown explains.

In a similar case, federal officials have arrested the alleged ringleader of a nationwide business in which veterans sold their military pensions.

Read the Post and Courier article.

Google scored a major overseas victory Tuesday, as Europe’s highest court ruled that the “right to be forgotten” online only applies inside the European Union, reports Courthouse News Service.

In the rulings, the European Court of Justice ruled that “there is no obligation under EU law, for a search engine operator who grants a request for de-referencing made by a data subject … to carry out such a de-referencing on all the versions of its search engine.”

The dispute was between Google and France’s Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties over how Google complies with requests for link removals.

Read the Courthouse News article.

Drinker Biddle & Reath’s The Restricting Covenant series takes a look at two states’ competing views on the enforceability of restrictive covenants and the critical importance of conducting a “choice of law” analysis to settle this feud.

Author Lawrence Del Rossi explains the backstory: “With respect to restrictive covenants, the conflict between Delaware, which is generally considered a ‘pro-enforcement’ jurisdiction, and California, which is generally considered an ‘anti-enforcement’ jurisdiction, definitely stands out in the crowd.”

The article compares freedom to contract versus freedom from restraints on trade and finds some common ground coast-to-coast.

Read the article.

A lawsuit alleges that the Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma has been transferring billions of dollars from the company to personal accounts in an effort to protect funds from litigation, reports The Washington Post.

“Now, as the maker of OxyContin heads to bankruptcy court, those billions represent a central sticking point in the company’s plan to resolve thousands of lawsuits against it. Purdue asked the bankruptcy judge, Robert D. Drain, on Wednesday to take the unusual step of temporarily halting lawsuits against the Sackler family,” write the Post‘s Renae Merle and Lenny Bernstein.

The company said the Sackler family could back out of a settlement agreement with multiple states if it cannot get the protection it seeks.

Read the Post article.

Bloomberg Law reports that LexisNexis Risk Solutions Inc. has been hit with a proposed class action alleging it unlawfully sold to law firms the personal information of drivers involved in car accidents.

Bloomberg’s Alexis Kramer explains:

“The data analytics company obtained names, addresses, and other data from thousands of motor vehicle records and sold that information to personal injury firms, plaintiff Jonathan Hatch alleged in a complaint filed Sept. 12 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina.”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

Because Enterprise Resource Planning implementation and software licensing contracts are as complicated as the software itself, there are a number of key things for general counsel to keep in mind as they review these contracts, according to a post on the Taft Technology Insights blog.

Author Marcus Harris offers a guide to negotiating and drafting contracts for ERP software systems, discussing seven main areas where companies slip up most-frequently.

The areas include: specify the vendor as the expert, detail liability, define responsibility, put everything in the contract, watch out for contractual remedies, and have a mechanism for controlling scope.

Read the article.

A post on the Tech & Sourcing blog of Morgan Lewis provides a checklist of common workstreams to consider inn outsourcing and managed services transactions.

Authors Barbara Murphy Melby and Kevin P. Dermody discuss governance, planning, people and asset transfers, resource mobilization, operations, processes and documentation, infrastructure and security enablement, networks, change and communications management, and third-party contracts disposition management.

Read the article.

A recent Delaware case serves as a reminder that a murky path to a signed agreement and lack of good record-keeping can lead to a finding of non-enforceable contracts, according to a post in the Taking Care of Business blog of White and Williams.

Authors Lori Smith and Gwenn Barney discuss a case in which an independent contractor for a company negotiated an arrangement to buy shares in the company. Although, both parties believed they had signed an agreement in 2007, because of the manner in which the drafts and signature pages were exchanged, the parties had differing understandings and recollections of what had actually been agreed upon.

The lack of any record trail, or “hard evidence,” in this case (other than the various drafts) made it difficult to find clear evidence of a meeting of the minds, the authors explain.

Read the article.

The Washington Post reports that state attorneys general  are initiating sweeping antitrust investigations against Silicon Valley’s largest companies, probing whether they undermine rivals and harm consumers.

More than 40 attorneys general are expected to announce their plan to investigate Google, delivering a rare rebuke of the search-and-advertising giant — and its efforts to maintain that dominance — from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, writes the Post‘s Tony Romm.

Romm explains that the states are potent actors in their own right, with the power to invoke local laws on antitrust and consumer-protection and to tap Washington’s antitrust statutes on behalf of their residents.

Read the  Post article.

Photo by Kārlis Dambrāns

Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith says the way the U.S. government is treating Huawei is un-American, reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

He said China’s leading maker of networking equipment and mobile phones should be allowed to buy U.S. technology, including software from his company, according to Businessweek’s Dina Bass.

“U.S. President Donald Trump has said Huawei, run by a former Chinese army technologist, is a national security threat, and his Department of Commerce has added the company to an export blacklist scheduled to take full effect in November,” Bass writes.

Read the Bloomberg Businessweek article.

A looming legal brawl over a new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission order will trigger a fresh round of judicial scrutiny focused on the line between state and federal authority in wholesale power markets, reports E&E News.

“Power producers and state regulators last month sued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit over Order No. 841, a FERC directive that opens the door for batteries and other energy storage technologies to participate in wholesale electricity markets — even if they are behind a retail meter,” according to E&E News’ Pamela King.

She quoted Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative: “This is a big deal because potentially we’ll see whether FERC has the authority to invite distribution-level resources into the market.”

Read the article.

Contract damages can be a great thing in a China contract, but only if done right, according to Dan Harris, writing in the Harris Bricken China Law Blog.

He explains that the term “contract damages” refers to a contract provision setting out the damages for breach. In the standard commercial contracts his firm writes for clients, the agreements usually include a specific damage amount for certain (but not all) violations of the contract terms.

“The only constant is that we try to make the amount as high as we can, while at the same time erring on the side of keeping it low enough so that it will actually work to scare the Chinese company into not breaching the contract,” Harris writes.

Read the article.

A legal victory for Delta Air Lines this year is unique in that it is the first time that a court has determined that a business owes no obligation of privacy to a customer because its privacy policy explicitly disclaims any type of contractual relationship between the business and its customers, writes Sunrita Sen in the Frost Brown Todd fbtTech Blog.

The case involved a breach of contract claim over the data breach suffered by the airline in 2017.

A U.S. district judge dismissed the claim, agreeing with Delta that the Airline Deregulation Act preempted the plaintiff’s breach of contract claims.

Read the article.

A recent ruling illustrates how courts will typically enforce a valid forum selection clause, absent a compelling showing of prejudice to the party opposing a lawsuit in the agreed-to forum, according to a post by Murtha Cullina’s Family Business Perspectives blog.

Michael P. Connolly explains that “while substantive disputes under an agreement may still arise, a forum selection clause at least may provide a measure of certainty from the outset as to the location of any future legal action. Without such a clause, a party to an agreement may be forced to litigate in a distant, inconvenient or otherwise unwanted location, which may ultimately increase the expense, disruption and risk in connection with any future lawsuit.”

Read the article.

CNBC reports that Google’s YouTube will pay $170 million to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general that it earned millions by illegally collecting personal information from children without their parents’ consent.

The settlement passed in a 3-2 vote by the commissioners, with the two Democrats voting against it, saying it did not go far enough to punish YouTube.

“The settlement requires Google and YouTube to pay $136 million to the FTC and $34 million to New York for allegedly violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act,” according to CNBC.

FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra dissented to the settlement, saying: “This latest violation is extremely serious. The company baited children using nursery rhymes, cartoons and other kid-directed content on curated YouTube channels to feed its massively profitable behavioral advertising business.”

Read the CNBC article.

ContractWorks has published a guide titled “The Contracts Checklist for M&A Due Diligence” and made it available for downloading from the company’s website at no charge.

“Reviewing the contracts and commitments of a target company is one of the most time-consuming and crucial components of a due diligence inquiry,” ContractWorks says on its website. “This guide serves as a non-exhaustive checklist of important contract types to consider during the M&A due diligence process.”

The guide covers:

• Contract due diligence pre- and post-transaction
• Categories of contracts that are important to review and understand
• Tips for getting started and ensuring success

Download the checklist.

The Dallas Morning News reports that career Fort Worth defense contractor is in trouble for allegedly making false claims about the type of aluminum he provided under a contract for aircraft landing gear, court records show.

Ross Hyde, 63, has been charged in federal court and faces up to five years in prison, if convicted, writes the News‘ Kevin Krause.

Hyde’s company, Vista Machining Co., has supplied the Pentagon with parts for tanks, aircraft and other military equipment, but inspectors said many of his products were cheap replacements, some illegally obtained from China, which he tried to hide from the government.

Read the  Morning News article.