NAVEX Global will conduct its first-ever online master class when it presents “Addressing & Preventing Sexual Harassment.”

The complimentary, 2.5-hour event, will be Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2018, beginning at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time | 11:30 a.m. Easter time.

“With the onslaught of high-profile sexual harassment allegations and an emerging “speak-up” movement around the globe, it’s evident that ignorance and a blind-eye has plagued our culture for too long,” NAVEX says on its website. “It is imperative—now more than ever—that your organization’s leadership fully understands what defines harassment and how to address it in the workplace.”

Register for the event.

Littler, with an employment and labor law practice representing management, has launched the Littler Pay Equity Assessment, which the firm says provides an analysis that assesses litigation risk and points towards solutions.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women are still paid 80 cents for every dollar paid to men, and the gap is even greater for African American and Hispanic women, Littler says in a release. As concerns about pay inequality continue to intensify – bringing new legal and reputational risks for employers – Littler’s platform provides a means of identifying pay disparities for people performing similar work under similar circumstances and proactively fixing them using tested legal strategies. Organizations can access the results of the assessment in a user-friendly dashboard that provides deep and concise examinations of compensation data in a privileged context.

The release continues:

“Having been at the forefront of every development in labor and employment law for the last 75 years, expanding our data-driven approach to address the complicated and important issue of pay equity was a natural evolution,” said Tom Bender and Jeremy Roth, co-managing directors of Littler, in a joint statement. “Not only does this new resource deepen our data analytics capabilities, it expands our commitment to improving diversity and equality in the workplace. By combining innovative technology with our deep experience counseling employers, we can help clients uncover issues they might not have known about and identify causes and possible solutions.”

The Littler Pay Equity Assessment measures compensation differences between demographic groups, identifies those that are statistically significant, and determines the extent to which these differences reflect legitimate business considerations. In a privileged context, Littler can also assist employers with crucial steps for a defensible audit and create a record of the criteria that drives a company’s compensation system and legitimate distinctions among employees that explain any disparities. This information helps human resources departments respond to questions from employees and creates an evidentiary record in the event of future litigation.

“The plaintiffs’ bar is increasingly targeting employers with class action lawsuits focused on fair pay, and state and local governments continue to adopt and expand pay equity laws,” said Denise Visconti, a shareholder and member of the firm’s Wage & Hour Practice Group, who is leading the Littler Pay Equity Assessment. “Proactively addressing this issue on a state specific basis can help lessen the risk of costly litigation and negative publicity that impacts employee morale and customer relationships. But it’s also the right thing to do and gives companies a competitive advantage by demonstrating their commitment to paying employees fairly.”

Hunton & Williams LLP announces the expansion of its national labor and employment practice with the addition of partners Michele J. Beilke and Julia Y. Trankiem and two associates in Los Angeles.

“As employment laws become increasingly complex, we are focused on growing the capabilities of our national practice, especially in geographic regions that are important to our clients,” said Emily Burkhardt Vicente, co-chair of Hunton & Williams’ labor and employment group and a partner in the Los Angeles office. “Michele and Julia are exceptional lawyers who bring a wealth of experience to our already robust employment practices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their team’s strong commitment to client service mirrors our own, and we are excited to have them join our team in California.”

Rafael Tumanyan and Sonya Goodwin are also joining the firm as associates in the Los Angeles office. All four came to the firm from Reed Smith LLP.

Beilke has nearly two decades of experience representing employers in California. Her practice focuses on the defense of state and national wage and hour class and collective actions, and single- and multi-plaintiff discrimination and harassment claims. She also counsels and trains employers on a wide range of employment law issues, including compliance with state and federal leave laws, accommodation requirements for workers with disabilities, sexual harassment prevention and managing reductions in force. Beilke has successfully tried numerous cases to verdict in both state and federal court and in arbitration. Beilke received both her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Southern California.

“Our experience is a perfect match for Hunton’s practice and growing footprint in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area,” Beilke said. “We have all spent our careers in California litigating many of the same types of cases Hunton’s practice is known for, so we are thrilled to be part of the team here with a national platform,” Trankiem added.

Trankiem has represented employers in class, collective, representative and hybrid actions brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act and state wage and hour laws. She also has defended employers in countless single- and multi-plaintiff discrimination, harassment and retaliation claims. Trankiem advises and counsels her clients regarding every facet of the employment relationship. She is active in local and national organizations, including the California Minority Counsel Program and the National Employment Law Council. She received her undergraduate degree from University of California, Los Angeles, and her law degree from University of Michigan Law School.

“Michele’s and Julia’s practices align with Hunton’s strengths in several leading industries, including financial services, retail and consumer products, and real estate development and finance,” said Ann Marie Mortimer, managing partner of the firm’s Los Angeles office and head of the energy and environmental litigation practice.

The firm’s national labor and employment practice has successfully litigated thousands of high-profile, high-risk matters in federal and state courts, hearings before federal and state law enforcement agencies, and mediations and arbitrations. The lawyers in the group represent clients in nearly every form of traditional and emerging labor and employment disputes, concerning issues at the forefront of new employment class and collective litigation trends across the country.

Of all the blockbuster cases at the Supreme Court this year, Janus v American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is expected to hold the fewest surprises, according to The Economist.

Janus, which is due to be argued on Feb. 26, asks whether public employees who choose not to join their designated union may nevertheless be charged “agency fees” to support collective bargaining. Non-members of a union may be required to subsidize contract negotiations over salary, benefits and working conditions. But those workers can’t be charged fees for a union’s political efforts, such as lobbying.

The Economist explains: “Janus is at bottom a bid to undermine America’s labour movement. The case is not presented that way; it arrives at the Supreme Court in First Amendment wrapping by express invitation from Justice Samuel Alito in a pair of recent cases.”

Read The Economist‘s article.

More than one-third of the U.S. workforce is bound to their employers by a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, according to a Harvard Business Review report this week, which cites figures from a research paper published last year in the Vanderbilt Law Review.

Amy X. Wang, writing for Quartz at Work, says the contracts have been steadily growing in both number and breadth as companies grow warier about competition and proprietary material.

She adds that the problem has spread to cover personal harassment, to the point that many have questioned whether NDAs can end up enabling abusers.

Read the article.

A Sixth Circuit ruling in a recent case shows that an employer’s notice of its institution of a mandatory arbitration policy or program is, without more, insufficient to compel an employee to arbitrate a subsequent dispute, writes Gilbert Samberg in Mintz Levin’s ADR: Advice From the Trenches blog.

He explains that something more is required in order to be able to infer the employee’s knowing assent to the new term of employment. The new “Employment Dispute Resolution Process” (EDRP) was promulgated after the plaintiffs had commenced employment.

Samberg writes that the appellate court “determined that the employer’s failure to notify the employees expressly that ‘they would accept the terms of the EDRP by continuing their employment’ was a critical omission, and thereupon held that the employees had not manifested knowing assent merely by continuing to work at FCA.”

Read the article.

Confidential sexual harassment settlements and accompanying attorney’s fees are no longer tax deductible under the new tax reform bill, according to a new post by Natalie Lynch of Lynch Law Firm in Austin.

In short, companies will no longer be able to use confidential settlements pertaining to sexual harassment as a tax-deductible settlement, she explains.

Non-confidential settlements can still be used for tax deductions. While the reform bill makes it clear that sexual harassment settlements that carry non-disclosure agreements can no longer be used as tax deductions, it stops short of making all confidential settlements non-deductible. Language that would include gender discrimination, retaliation, or Title IV is entirely absent in the bill.

Read the article.

Bloomberg is reporting that a group of Lanetix Inc. software engineers in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., were laid off for trying to join a union, according to organizers working with the group and a complaint obtained by Bloomberg Law.

“The move came less than two weeks after the workers filed a petition to join a CWA unit and days before a union election hearing scheduled for Jan 31,” according to the report by Hassan A. Kanu and Josh Eidelson. “The workers said the company told them the layoffs were due to lackluster fourth quarter performance last year, Fiedler said.”

A CWA executive director told the reporters the company said it was “looking at moving their engineering operations overseas.”

Read the Bloomberg article.

Image by Alpha Stock Images

Employers can find good news and some bad news in Seyfarth Shaw’s 14th Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation, which analyzes 1,408 rulings.

The firm has posted the 57-page report on its website and has created a microsite that provides a brief overview of the survey’s findings.

David Shadovitz of Human Resource Executive also has written a summary of the report.

Shadovitz offers the good news for employers from the report: “Legal precedents and new defense approaches resulted in better statistical outcomes for employers in opposing class-certification requests for the second straight year. For instance, in wage-and-hour litigation—one of the more active categories of employment law—employers won 63 percent of decertification rulings, a success rate of nearly 20 percent from the year before.”

On the other side of the coin, he writes, the monetary value of the top workplace class-action settlements jumped more than $1 billion to a record high of $2.72 billion.

Read the Seyfarth report.

Carlton Fields shareholder Eleanor M. Yost asks and answers the question: What is the difference between an employment agreement that says “I hereby assign inventions I create during my employment to my employer,” and one that says “I will assign inventions I create during my employment to my employer”?

The difference, she writes, is one word … and possibly millions of dollars.

The article on the firm’s website discusses a case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that affirmed a decision that an employment agreement providing an employee “will assign” title to her inventions to her employer did not automatically transfer title or any related patent rights.

Read the article.

Senior officials with the National Labor Relations Board have expressed concern over a plan outlined by the board’s new general counsel to demote the senior civil servants who resolve most labor cases, reports The New York Times.

Peter B. Robb, the agency’s general counsel and a Trump appointee, outlined the proposal this month in a conference call with the civil servants

“Under the proposal, those civil servants — considered by many conservatives and employers to be biased toward labor — would answer to a small cadre of officials installed above them in the National Labor Relations Board’s hierarchy,” explains Noam Scheiber.

The result could be result in a system friendlier to employers named in complaints of unfair labor practices or facing unionization drives.

Read the Times article.

Above the Law reports that Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart nonequity shareholder Dawn Knepper has hit her employer with a $300 million purported class-action suit alleging gender discrimination and unequal pay.

In her complaint, Knepper alleges: “Through formal policies and widespread practices, [Ogletree’s] male leadership interferes with, limits, or prevents female shareholders from receiving the appropriate credit for the business they bring to the firm and their hard work in running complex and demanding cases day-to-day.”

Kathryn Rubino writes that the complaint also alleges that on average, women shareholders make  to to $110,000 less than their male counterparts. And the complaint notes that while women represent about 58 percent of associates at Ogletree, a mere 32 percent of shareholders are women.

Read the Above the Law article.

Litigators are settling more cases as labor agencies and federal courts fill up with business-friendly appointees, reports Bloomberg.

“While employers across the U.S. paid a record amount in settlements for workplace violations last year, don’t expect this to mark the beginning of a trend. Think of it more as the storm before the calm, as labor lawyers rush to lock in payouts ahead of a shifting legal landscape,” writes Rebecca Greenfield.

She quotes Paul DeCamp a lawyer at Epstein Becker & Green who represents employers:

“I think that what we see is a race to settle. I’ve seen it in my practice. Cases that plaintiffs’ counsel felt very strongly about and seemed more bullish and willing to go to trial—since the election they were more eager to settle those cases.”

Read the Bloomberg article.

When a U.S. company decides to hire an employee in another country, the question of whether to send the applicant an offer letter inevitably arises, writes Samina Weil in the Fisher Phillips Cross Border Employer Blog.

“Sending an offer letter prior to the final contract is normal practice in the US. But this is not the case in other jurisdictions, and for good reason,” she explains.

She describes how some U.S. employment practices differ from those in foreign jurisdictions and how to approach the problems those differences can cause.

“Do not be tempted to send an offer letter (or seek legal advice before doing so), but have a contract drawn up for the position for which you are hiring and personalize it to the individual you want to hire,” she warns.

Read the article.

High-profile sexual harassment scandals involving the entertainment, politics and media fields are spurring businesses everywhere to take a closer look at their policies and training programs, according to a post on the website of Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

In many cases, employers are finding that generic policies with cut-and-paste legal text and one-size-fits-all instructional videos are simply not doing enough to connect with employees and address key issues.

With careers at stake – not to mention the reputations of entire companies – employers are re-examining workplace culture, training, complaint procedures and everything in between, says employment attorney Audrey Mross of Dallas’ Munck Wilson Mandala. For example, businesses are finding that live training provides a more interactive experience that resonates with workers. “Previously, many employers thought showing an off-the-shelf training video would be sufficient, but the interactivity of live training does a better job of ensuring that key concepts are fully understood.”

In addition, training is moving beyond a focus purely on harassment to address problems including rudeness, poor judgment and disrespect toward co-workers. States are moving in a similar direction with a recent amendment to California law requiring harassment training to include bullying.

“I am a big fan of moving beyond a recitation of the applicable law to delving into actual examples to help workers begin to understand where the line is between acceptable and unacceptable behavior,” says Mross, who frequently makes presentations to businesses on workplace policies and employment law. “I’ve found that this is what triggers an ‘aha’ moment for many, and often individuals will speak up and share their own experiences with their peers in the training session. When attendees are hearing the message from both the trainer and their fellow workers, it really starts to resonate.”

On Thursday, Jan. 18, 2018, the experts at NAVEX Global will discuss the challenges of ethics and compliance and offer predictions for 2018’s most pressing compliance issues.

The complimentary webinar will be at 1 p.m. Pacific time/ 1 p.m. Eastern time.

This past year was filled with news headlines that resulted in major legal repercussions for many organizations—causing workplace unrest or wreaking havoc on reputations.

Webinar participants will be able to take a proactive look at their programs and make sure they have a legally defensible strategy that’s prepared for any scenario, NAVEX says in its invitation.

Register for the webinar.

Forum selection clauses that are not adhesive will be interpreted independently of the court’s determination of the enforceability and validity of the contract as a whole, according to a post in Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice’s Employment Law Blog.

Robert Chandler discussed the case of Reed v. The Reilly Company, LLC, in which the plaintiff, terminated by the Reilly Co., brought claims in Missouri. Reilly moved to dismiss, based on a contract provision stating that disputes must be brought in Kansas.

“Parties drafting forum selection clauses should exercise care to avoid contracts that are adhesive – i.e. agreements reached without a realistic opportunity for bargaining – and to choose forums which will be considered “neutral” and not overly advantageous to the party drafting the agreement,” Chandler explains.

Read the article.

A judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco is under a formal misconduct inquiry after several of his clerks accused him of inappropriate behavior, according to a report in SFGATE.

Reporter Annie Ma writes that the circuit’s chief judge issued an order launching an inquiry into judicial misconduct by Judge Alex Kozinski, citing sexual misconduct allegations published in The Washington Post.

“Six women who had worked for Kozinski told the Post that he made sexual comments about them and subjected them to inappropriate conduct, such as asking them to watch pornography in his chambers,” according to the report.

Above the Law has a post stating that multiple sources are reporting that three clerks for Kozinski have decided to resign from the court.

Read the SFGATE article.

In the era of Harvey Weinstein, The Washington Post warns, you shouldn’t be surprised to arrive at your company holiday party to find someone from human resources “distributing drink tickets, two per head, as if it’s communist Russia and we’re rationing trash red wine now.”

Reporter Lavanya Ramanathan refers to a poll conducted this fall by placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which found that only 49 percent of companies said they planned to serve alcohol at their holiday events, compared with nearly 62 percent last year.

Ross J. Peters, an Illinois lawyer who specializes in sexual harassment cases, told the reporter: “Sometimes, men feel it’s an opportunity to make themselves more familiar in a party atmosphere. Harassers use it for intimate conversation.”

Read the Post‘s article.