Employees' 'Tip Income' and the IRS
February 27, 2007
Employers that have a lot of tipped employees often face a host of employment law challenges, including payroll. Under the Internal Revenue Code ('Code'), tips are income subject to income tax withholding and usually subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes as well. Problems often arise when the employer does not know exactly how much tip income an employee receives, either because they are in cash, or because the employees, such as hosts or busers, are indirectly tipped by other employees, such as waiters. This article offers employers a short guide for dealing with the federal taxation of tipped employees and the IRS' compliance programs.
FDA's New Quality System Guidance: Minimizing a Pharmaceutical Company's Risk
February 27, 2007
On Sept. 29, 2006, the Food and Drug Administration ('FDA') issued a final guidance on quality systems for pharmaceutical companies: formalized business practices that define management responsibilities for organizational structure, processes, procedures, and resources needed to fulfill product and service requirements, improve customer satisfaction, and ensure continual improvement. The 'Quality Systems Approaches to Pharmaceutical Current Good Manu-facturing Practice Regulations' (the 'Guidance Document') is intended to help companies comply with the FDA's current Good Manufacturing Practices ('cGMP') regulations. The Guidance Document is part of the FDA's Pharmaceutical cGMPs for the 21st Century Initiative, a program that seeks to integrate quality systems and risk management approaches into existing manufacturing programs with the goal of encouraging industry to adopt modern and innovative manufacturing technologies.
Practice Tip: Crafting a Winning Document Retention Policy to Avoid Court-Imposed Penalties
February 27, 2007
Part One of this article discussed, inter alia, what the duty to preserve documents entails, when it begins, how a document retention policy can help protect against spoliation claims, and the consequences of failure to preserve documents. This installment addresses repetitive product liability litigation and what counsel should do when notified of a lawsuit.
Hotline
February 27, 2007
Recent rulings of importance to you and your practice.
The Medimmune Decision
February 27, 2007
In <i>MedImmune v. Genentech</i>, decided Jan. 9, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court swept away over a decade of Federal Circuit precedent to find that a licensee need not breach a patent license in order to file a declaratory judgment action for patent invalidity or unenforceability. The decision shifted substantial power from licensors to licensees: previously, a licensee had to choose the lesser of two evils. On one hand, the licensee could comply with the terms of a license agreement and forego any challenge to a patent, even if it felt the patent was not infringed, invalid, or unenforceable. On the other hand, the licensee could breach the license and challenge infringement, validity, and enforceability; in doing so, however, it exposed itself to potentially trebled damages and attorney's fees under 35 U.S.C. '' 284 & 285 and an injunction against future sales under 35 U.S.C. ' 283 if its challenge failed.
Disclosing Information Security Breaches Under Privacy and Securities Laws
February 27, 2007
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse estimates that over 100 million records containing sensitive personal information have been involved in security breaches. This non-profit consumer organization has tracked these breaches on its website (www.privacyrights.org) beginning with the significant and well-publicized ChoicePoint breach in February 2005. As a result, over two-thirds of states enacted security breach notification laws governing the notification that a company must make in the event of a security breach. This article outlines the requirements for providing notification of a security breach under state security breach notification law by any company and the factors that a public company needs to take into account regarding whether to disclose a security breach under federal securities law.
Thimerosal and Autism: A Paradigm for Judges to Act As Gatekeepers
February 27, 2007
One of the principal problems in our civil justice system is holding a defendant responsible for some very bad harm that it did not cause. Acting as 'gatekeepers,' judges are the key persons who can prevent this injustice, and many keep out both so-called 'junk science' and preserve the integrity of our legal system. Some very well meaning judges, however, do not do so. Sometimes, they can be persuaded to allow a jury to have a look at a case that should have been dismissed.
FLSA Collective Action Litigation
February 27, 2007
When the dust settles from the current round of discussions on increasing the federal minimum wage, the lowest paid of the country's non-exempt employees may or may not be earning an additional dollar or two per hour. Either way, the debate will have drawn the country's ' and the plaintiffs' bars' ' attention toward the lowest paid of our country's workers, and the climate will be right for those attorneys to begin focusing not only on how much non-exempt employees are being paid per hour, but also on whether these workers are being paid in a manner that is consistent with every intricate (and often contrary-to-common-sense) twist and turn of federal and state law.
Quarterly State Compliance Review
February 27, 2007
Corporations, LLCs, and other statutory business entities must comply with the provisions of their home states' business entity laws. These laws are constantly being amended by the state legislatures and interpreted by the courts. This edition of our new regular series, Quarterly State Compliance Review, looks at some amendments to these laws that went into effect during the last three months, and reviews some court cases of interest decided during that period.
The Missing Link Between Corporate IT and Legal
February 27, 2007
In 15 years of advising corporate and government litigators on the best processes and technology to deliver discovery management solutions, our company, IE Discovery, consistently encounters a common challenge in almost every organization: The legal and information technology departments simply do not communicate well. This can have major ramifications in producing information in response to requests from investigators, regulators, or litigation opponents. In the following dialogue, IE Discovery's corporate counsel, Stacy O'Neil Jackson, and its technology services and support manager, Keith Moore [the authors], discuss some of the reasons for this breakdown and provide some practical tips for improving the communication between IT and Legal.
