A proposed executive order could require certain government contractors to provide paid sick leave to certain employees at certain times, resulting to a new benefit for 437,000 employees who currently get no such benefit, and possibly augmenting the leave of about 400,000 more workers, according to U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez.

In a report written by the Federal Contractor Compliance Practice Group and Wage and Hour Practice Group of Paul Hastings LLP, contractors who disregard the new requirements beginning in 2017 can be subject to debarment, among other penalties, so it is important that contractors understand the proposed rules and plan to ensure compliance.

“Federal contractors certainly should examine their policies in light of the proposed regulations, but all employers operating in jurisdictions with paid sick leave laws should review their policies for compliance with state and local laws,” according to the article.

Read the article.

Photo by Rubenstein

Though many have dismissed the prospect of a Michael Bloomberg run for president as a third-party candidate as pure fantasy due to the challenging electoral math, a source close to Bloomberg says their research shows he would have a good chance in a Trump versus Sanders race, reports New York magazine.

The sources say the former NYC mayor could easily pass the 270 electoral vote mark by winning in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Florida, Maryland, California, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina and Texas.

“And yet … Hillary Clinton’s post–New Hampshire recovery and crushing Super Tuesday victory has tempered Bloomberg’s lust for the highest office in the land. He’s told friends he does not want to challenge Clinton directly. ‘He doesn’t want to be Ralph Nader,’ a close friend says. Bloomberg and Clinton have maintained a respectful relationship over the years. In fact, in 2012, Bloomberg lobbied her to run for mayor as his successor. At the very least, he is comforted by the fact that the Democratic nominee likely won’t be an avowed socialist,” the story says.

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While most corporate counsels are still trying to figure out what the Cybersecurity Act of 2015 (CSA) does for them, Rob Knake, a Senior Fellow for Cyber Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, discusses five ways the U.S. Congress can make the law better during 2016.

He  wrote the article for Defense One.

In the article, he provides details on his five suggestions: Antitrust may have gone too far (or not far enough), whether Internet Service Providers are “information systems,” benefits of letting the Department of Defense establish information sharing programs with defense companies, classified sharing requires a classified network, and It may undermine sharing.

Read the article.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

The revelation that the Justice Department has granted immunity to a former State Department staff member who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server is a likely indication that the investigation is nearing a conclusion, reports The Washington Post, but should not be read as a sign that the leading Democratic presidential candidate is going to face criminal charges, legal experts said.

“That Bryan Pagliano — a 2008 presidential campaign worker who set up the server in Clinton’s home — will avoid charges as he cooperates with FBI agents is a significant, if incremental, development, according to former federal prosecutors and white-collar defense lawyers who have been following the case,” the report says.

The granting of immunity to Pagliano “could be an indication that agents and prosecutors are winding down an inquiry that will not result in charges, said Justin Shur, a former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who now works in private practice at the MoloLamken firm,” the Post report continues.

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New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said that evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Trump University is “pretty straightforward,” reports CNN Money.

“It [was] a bait and switch scheme,” he said on CNN’s New Day Friday, defending his and other lawsuits against the school. “He did ads saying my hand-picked instructors will teach you my personal secrets. You just copy what I did and get rich.”

While Schneiderman said it’s clear that Trump was not involved in hiring instructors or creating the program’s curriculum, “If you tell people we’re going to teach you Donald Trump’s secrets, and he never had any part in writing the curriculum, that’s fraud,” Schneiderman said.

In the CNN interview, Schneiderman said thousands of students paid millions of dollars to the school, which closed in 2010. While the attorney general’s suit is a civil suit rather than a criminal action, Trump could face millions in fines, Schneiderman said.

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FBI Director James Comey told a congressional panel on Tuesday that a final court ruling forcing Apple Inc. to give the FBI data from an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters would be “potentially precedential” in other cases where the agency might request similar cooperation from technology companies, reports Reuters.

Comey’s remarks at the hearing vary slightly from a statement he made last week that ordering Apple to unlock the phone was “unlikely to be a trailblazer” for setting a precedent for other cases.

“Tuesday’s testimony from Comey and remarks before the same U.S. House Judiciary Committee by Apple’s general counsel, Bruce Sewell, brought to Congress a public fight between Apple and the government over the dueling interests of privacy and security that has so far only been heard in the courts,” Reuters says.

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The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has prompted Dow Chemical to settle a class action lawsuit and pay out $835 million, reports CNN.

“The case involved an allegation that Dow and other makers of a chemical known as urethane had conspired to fix prices between 1999 and 2004,” the report says. “Other defendants in the case settled with the plaintiffs but the case against Dow went to a jury trial.”

Dow was facing a $1.1 billion judgment in a price fixing case, and the company was appealing the verdict all the way to the Supreme Court. But now Dow Chemical says it no longer thinks it could win its appeal without Scalia on the bench.

Read the article.

Photo by Marc Nozell

A federal judge questioned the Obama administration’s “good faith” in helping keep former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails secret for six years and said he may end up issuing a subpoena to force her to turn over her entire account to the government, The Washington Times reports.

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said he will grant limited discovery to Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sued to get a look at Clinton’s emails.

“That could give the group — and the broader public — answers as to who approved Mrs. Clinton’s unique arrangement, who else in government knew about it and why they shielded it for so long,” the report says. “It also could force Mrs. Clinton to answer questions about how she sorted through her account and decided which messages she didn’t want to turn over to the government.”

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A King County, Washington, judge has sanctioned two attorneys hired by Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist’s office, citing their “intentionally misleading conduct” during a long-running lawsuit, according to a report in the Tacoma News Tribune.

“The ruling Wednesday from Superior Court Judge Beth Andrus sanctions Seattle attorneys Richard Jolley and Stewart Estes,” the report says. “It orders them to pay $32,000 for withholding information from civil attorney Fred Diamondstone and conducting ‘misleading settlement negotiations’ that fell apart in December.”

The case involves false-arrest lawsuit filed by a former resident who was twice charged with sex crimes by Lindquist’s office.

“Those charges were dismissed initially in 2011 because of erroneous evidence: a picture wrongly identified as Dalsing. The charges were dismissed again by Pierce County Superior Court Judge Ed Murphy in 2015, due to a finding of prosecutorial vindictiveness,” the report says.

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The whistleblower, employment and civil rights law firm Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP has announced the release of its 2016 comprehensive practice guides for the whistleblower programs for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

The firm has produced its SEC Whistleblower Practice Guide annually since the inception of the SEC Whistleblower Program in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank). As a companion manual, the firm’s first-ever CFTC Whistleblower Practice Guide covers the whistleblower program for the CFTC, an independent agency with regulatory authority over futures trading.

The firm says in a release that both guides provide in-depth explanations of the rules and procedures concerning the respective programs, offer valuable practice trips for whistleblowers and their counsel, and outline the legal protections that whistleblowers have against retaliation for reporting violations to the SEC and CFTC.

“The Katz, Marshall & Banks SEC guide is an invaluable resource containing all of the ‘nuts and blots’ about reporting securities violations to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,” said David J. Marshall, a founding partner of the firm and the SEC guide’s principal author. “The guide offers great detail on everything from preparing a winning ‘tip’ to cooperating in an SEC investigation to claiming a financial whistleblower award for helping to enforce the nation’s securities laws.”

SEC officials have continually praised the whistleblower program as a significant addition to the Commission’s ability to enforce the nation’s securities law – in some cases facilitating early intervention to minimize the harm to investors from unlawful conduct. To date, the SEC has paid over $55 million to 23 whistleblowers under the program.

The CFTC Whistleblower Program, which also was established through Dodd-Frank, began accepting whistleblower tips in September 2012, with the number of tips steadily rising since the program’s inception. The CFTC thus far has paid two awards to whistleblowers in connection with these tips, including a September 2015 payout totaling $290,000.

“We are pleased to introduce the Katz, Marshall & Banks CFTC Whistleblower Practice Guide to help whistleblowers earn the financial awards for helping to regulate commodity futures trading in the United States,” said Lisa J. Banks, a founding partner of the firm and the principal author of CFTC guide. “Following a couple of recent, significant awards under the CFTC Whistleblower Program, and with $300 million set aside in a special whistleblower fund, the Commission clearly is gearing up for a greater number and higher quality of whistleblower tips and payout of substantial awards.”

Available for free download from the Katz, Marshall & Banks website, the SEC Whistleblower Practice Guide can be found here, and the CFTC Whistleblower Practice Guide is available here.

About Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP

Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP is a boutique law firm representing plaintiffs in the areas of whistleblower, employment discrimination and sexual harassment law; Title IX of the Education Amendments; and other civil rights and civil liberties matters. The firm’s lawyers also represent whistleblowers in seeking monetary rewards by submitting tips to the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodities Futures Trading Commission Whistleblower Programs, and through the filing of “qui tam” actions under the False Claims Act.

The eligibility of Sen. Ted Cruz to run for president will have a hearing Friday in Chicago, according to multiple news outlets.

CNN is reporting that a judge in Illinois on Friday will hear a lawsuit challenging Ted Cruz’s eligibility to serve as president, putting questions about the Texas senator’s status back into the news the day before the South Carolina primary.

Cruz has never denied being born in Canada, arguing that longstanding U.S. statutory law validates his claim that he was automatically a U.S. citizen at birth because his mother was a U.S. citizen.

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One the world’s largest telecommunications companies and its subsidiary agreed to fines and forfeitures with U.S. and Dutch authorities totaling more than $800 million to resolve a long-running bribery scheme involving a government official in Uzbekistan, USA Today reports.

The report says Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said VimpelCom, headquartered in Amsterdam, and its Uzbek-based subsidiary Unitel LLC, made “bribery a foundation of their business model” throughout Uzbekistan.

“More than $114 million in bribes, according to federal prosecutors, was funneled to the Uzbek official during a six-year period by the firm, which issues publicly-traded securities in the U.S. The companies concealed the bribes through various payments to a shell company that some VimpelCom and Unitel officials knew was owned by the recipient of the bribe payments,” the newspaper reports.

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The Office of Management and Budgets (OMB) has issued a memo mandating that all billing and invoicing from government contractors and federal agencies must be electronic. Approximately 12 million invoices still need to make the transition, report two partners in Alston & Bird.

They advise that government contractors and payment service providers should be prepared to implement clear, practical methods of e-payments.

“Pilot programs in the federal government – both pure payment-vendor relationships and added services to banking relationships – are available to facilitate the OMB-directed shift to e-invoicing,” says Jeff Belkin, partner and leader of Alston & Bird’s Government Contracts Group with expertise in complex government contract compliance issues. “While it is unclear if the shift to e-invoicing will ultimately end in a no-fee electronic payments program, or, a model that requires the government (or its partners) to pay others to facilitate the program, there surely will be many challenges before that final equilibrium is reached.”

“As of July 2015, a mere 40% of invoices were processed using e-invoicing,” says Tony Balloon, partner in Alston & Bird’s Financial Services & Products Group, who has deep knowledge of the payments industry. “Though the initial transition leading up to the 2018 deadline will be challenging, the adoption of e-invoicing will result in increased efficiency and timely payments for both federal agencies and government contractors.”

Intellectual property is often a company’s most valuable asset, and for companies with federal government customers, following the government’s rules can mean the difference between maximizing and losing value in newly developed IP, reports McGuireWoods in a legal alert.

Christian B. Nagel, Todd R. Steggerda, Ronald L. Fouse, David G. Dargatis and Lorna J. Tang wrote the article.

Their article addresses rights in technical data and computer software.

Contractors “should place the highest priority on reviewing, understanding and, if possible, negotiating IP terms prior to signing any government contract,” they write. “After the contract has been executed, the contractor should ensure that at least one member of its legal or management team understands the applicable IP rules and ensures strict compliance throughout contract performance.”

Read the article.

On January 22, 2016, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell unveiled a proposed rule to reduce the waste of natural gas that results from venting, flaring and leaks by oil and gas production on public and tribal lands, reports Van Ness Feldman LLP.

“The ‘Methane and Waste Reduction Rule’ — which was published in the Federal Register on February 8, 2016, setting off a 60-day comment period — would update existing provisions of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM’s) onshore oil and gas leasing and operations regulations and introduce new requirements aimed at curbing waste and minimizing royalty-free use of production,” according to the article written by Kyle Danish, Jonathan Simon, R. Scott Nuzum, and Avi Zevin.

Their article examines key legal and policy changes in the proposed methane and waste reduction rule.

Read the article.

Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement cases alleging violative behavior by corporate directors are rare and will only be initiated in clear cases of misconduct or when obvious signs of violative behavior are ignored, Lara Shalov Mehraban, associate director in the agency’s New York Regional Office, said in a report posted by BloombergBNA.

“Mehraban attempted to allay concerns voiced by corporations and their lawyers about the SEC enforcement cases against corporate directors and other gatekeepers, such as compliance officers, who may try to fix compliance problems and find themselves entangled in an agency investigation,” according to the report.

“While recent SEC enforcement cases have involved directors, Mehraban said such cases aren’t common and shouldn’t concern corporate directors and officers faithfully carrying out their mandates,” the report continues.

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Lincare, a major provider of in-home respiratory care and other services, will pay $238,900 in civil monetary penalties for violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), federal authorities announced Wednesday, according to a report by Home Health Care News.

“This marks only the second time that the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has imposed civil monetary penalties for a HIPAA violation. The penalty was challenged but now has been upheld by an administrate law judge (ALJ),” the report says.

The breach involved a Lincare branch in Wynne, Arkansas, doing business as United Medical. Faith Shaw worked as a manager there from 2005 until 2009. Shaw had stored records of 278 patients in her car, which she left behind when she moved out of her marital home in 2008. Her husband reported finding those records to the OCR.

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Connor Raso of the Securities and Exchange Commission has published a 67-page article that analyzes when and why administrative agencies avoid rulemaking procedural requirements such as the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment process.

The summary of the rticle states that “original empirical analysis shows that agencies invoke statutory exemptions to avoid such rulemaking procedures more frequently as the threat of a lawsuit challenging that avoidance declines. In situations with a low threat of suit, agencies have avoided rulemaking procedures for more than 90 percent of rules. Such avoidance falls when the threat of suit increases. But even when litigation ensues, courts do not consistently require agencies to comply with rulemaking procedures. This spotty judicial enforcement, along with significant agency avoidance, casts doubt on the claim that rulemaking procedures have significantly burdened the rulemaking process.”

But agency avoidance suggests that rulemaking procedures do less than commonly thought to promote public deliberation in the rulemaking process, foster agency expertise, guard against agency arbitrariness, and make agencies accountable to Congress and to the public. “This suggests that agency avoidance of rulemaking procedures has some benefits, but also many costs,” Raso writes.

Read the white paper.

National law firm Wilson Elser announces that Jim Perras has joined the firm’s Hartford, CT, office as of counsel.

Perras joins Wilson Elser with more than 18 years of experience working at high levels in the legislative and executive branches in the Connecticut state government.

Perras has advised top legislative leaders and commissioners, first as a senior executive adviser to a former president pro tempore of the Senate and most recently as a legislative and administrative adviser to the commissioner of the Insurance Department. He has worked closely with industry experts, associations, consumer advocacy groups and others to promote the successful passage of transformative insurance legislation.

“Jim is a welcome addition to our growing Government Affairs and Insurance Regulatory practices in Connecticut,” said Brian Del Gatto, regional managing partner of the Connecticut offices. “His keen ability to help our clients achieve their goals by understanding their businesses, the legislative process and key players in Connecticut politics, make him a tremendous asset to the firm and to the organizations we serve.”

Perras served on the House of Delegates for the Connecticut Bar Association and as a board member of the Town of Manchester Redevelopment Agency.

Perras earned his J.D. degree from Western New England School of Law (2010) and a B.A. degree from the University of Connecticut (1997).

Starting April 1, 2016, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will begin accepting H-1B visa petition filings – subject to the annual cap – for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, 2016, reports Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, LLP on its website.

The H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to employ foreign workers temporarily in specialty occupations.

“To maximize client chances that their applications will be picked in this year’s anticipated lottery, we strongly recommend that H-1B visa petitions that are subject to the cap be filed as close to April 1, 2016, as possible,” the firm advises.

The article lists exceptions to the H-1B cap and alternatives to the H-1B.

Read the article.