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When is history simply that: "history"? Perhaps never under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which sailed through the House and Senate in January and became the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Obama.

Features

It is that time of year when many managers are either presented with the daunting and time-consuming task of completing performance appraisals or have just finished their appraisals and are waiting to communicate the results to the employees. In either situation, the process is usually coupled with questions from managers as to why evaluations are necessary. Employees often wonder themselves.

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The proposed Employee Free Choice Act ("EFCA") would dramatically alter the landscape of labor-management relations in favor of unions seeking to organize employees of non-union employers. Businesses that do not prepare soon for the impact of this prospective law, as well as their employees, will be significantly affected.

The upward spiral of legal costs, including the demands of Electronic Database Discovery (EDD) and the impact on early case assessment, puts pressure on departmental legal budgets. Artificial floors created by budgets derived from prior-year expenditures will give way to application of traditional return on investment (ROI) analysis to set appropriate cost levels.

A couple of years ago few people would have thought that a socially conscious company that specializes in selling organic groceries would find itself in a knock-down, drag-out brawl with the Federal Trade Commission. But that's just what has unfolded as a result of the FTC's challenge of the merger between Whole Foods Market, Inc. and Wild Oats Markets, Inc.

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the Department of Justice Antitrust Division ("Division") recently issued an interesting policy paper that clarifies its position on certain issues under the leniencyprogram, which positions previously may have been known only to those who practice regularly in the field of criminal antitrust.

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The guidelines were designed to strike a balance between the financial industry's need to attract top talent to lead in the current economic climate and the public's interest in requiring transparency and accountability. They require not only disclosure of, but an explanation and justification of the policy supporting certain compensation decisions. Here's how they work.

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While attitudes a year ago might have suggested that 2008 would be a year of great stockholder activism with takeover defenses continuing to fade from the scene, the drying up of credit for M&A transactions and plunging stock prices and asset values actually caused public companies to re-examine their preparedness for hostile activity and, ironically, led to the re-emergence of a takeover defense that had fallen out of favor in recent years.