LJN Newsletters

No sexual harassment case has received as much attention in the press recently as the one brought against Fox News and television host Bill O'Reilly by former Fox producer Andrea Mackris. This case grabbed the headlines with almost as much fervor as did Anita Hill's claims against then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas in 1994, which had previously been the most notorious of sexual harassment claims. The Mackris/O'Reilly case has frequently been compared with the Hill/Thomas case -- not only because of the cases' relative notoriety, but also because they involve similar allegations: that a subordinate employee was subject to verbal harassment.

On Sept. 30, 2004, California enacted a law that requires employers who operate in California and who employ 50 or more persons to provide all supervisory employees 2 hours of sexual harassment training every 2 years. Employers must complete the first round of training for supervisors by Jan. 1, 2006. After that date, new supervisors must be trained within 6 months of obtaining a supervisory position. Employers are scrambling to ensure that they have trained all California-based supervisors by year's end. This article describes why employers should not focus simply on training supervisors in California, but in every state.

Recent months have delivered to employers what could be seen as a nasty one-two punch. First, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) announced that it planned to focus its resources on "rooting out" systemic discrimination -- and unveiled proposed guidelines completely altering the way it will analyze potential compensation discrimination. The new guidelines, which require employers of a certain size to use a statistical tool called multiple regression analysis, will be enforced by a team of statisticians the OFCCP has newly hired to create the ominous-sounding Division of Statistical Analysis. Second, the recent Supreme Court decision allowing disparate impact claims in age cases could be interpreted as giving the green light to additional age-bias lawsuits by removing the hurdle of proving or even alleging intent. However, these changes will not necessarily have an adverse impact on employers, and may actually be helpful.

The hills were alive with the sound of Sarbanes-Oxley in January when the Swiss mountain resort of Davos hosted the World Economic Forum. Representatives of some of Europe's largest companies discussed the impact of the U.S. legislation on their operations, asking whether the impact of the additional regulation was worth the prestige of a New York listing or the opportunity to raise money on the world's largest capital market. It was reported that up to 60 European companies were ready to drop their U.S. listings.

Throughout the world, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation might well have had the biggest impact in corporate governance since the introduction of limited liability. To that end, jurisdictions outside the U.S. have not been idle. A recent Eversheds survey found more than 100 studies on the topic in 29 European countries within and outside the EU. Clearly, proper compliance to corporate governance guidelines is top of the list to in-house counsel across the EU, as well as the U.S. This roundtable sought to road-test some of these issues and look to some of the U.S.'s best governed corporations to see if there is a map for the journey ahead.

The recent release of a dead soldier's e-mail account to his parents in Michigan has sparked a new debate over personal data: Who owns your e-mail when you die?

Recent cases in e-commerce law and in the e-commerce industry.

Lawyers and businesspeople are like most people who read things they must or are interested in: They read the exciting parts first ' and that includes contracts. Everyone is interested in the money, and what they will get from the deal.
But what about what might be considered the marginalia, the add-ons ' or what some people might think of as those categories ' the escape clauses of the contract? Well, you can bet that no one reads the term and termination sections first. These "quiet" clauses are usually hidden, well in the back of a contract, with the boilerplate and signatures.