What’s New in Employment Law?

I spent part of last week in San Antonio, catching up with old friends, making a few new ones, sharing some laughs, and talking about one of my favorite subjects: employment law. I know that might not sound like everyone's idea of a great time, but for me, it really...

It's the kind of story you'd expect from a spy thriller. Except it allegedly happened in a conference room at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Earlier this month, federal authorities arrested an OpenAI engineer accused of secretly installing an audio recording...

Who counts as “family”? It's a question California employers likely will hear more often, particularly when employees request time off to care for someone who isn't a spouse, parent, child, or other traditionally recognized relative. Consider an employee who asks for...

Let’s face it. Some days, working in HR feels less like a profession and more like supervising a middle school cafeteria. Except the students have mortgages, LinkedIn profiles, and access to attorneys. Someone is furious because a coworker didn’t invite them to lunch....

California employers can use AI to help make employment decisions, but starting next year, they cannot let the algorithm do the firing. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 947 on September 30, creating what supporters have dubbed the “No Robo Bosses Act.” The new...

California employers can be forgiven for spending much of their compliance time thinking about California law. The Fair Employment and Housing Act. The Civil Rights Department. California wage and hour rules. California leave laws. California regulations that seem to...

Most workplace problems do not arrive neatly packaged as legal claims. An employee may say a supervisor is treating them differently, complain about a coworker’s comment, announce that they are recording workplace conversations, or raise a discrimination concern in...

Human resources professionals are often the first people to recognize when an ordinary workplace issue is becoming a legal one. An employee mentions retaliation. A leave request gets complicated. A termination suddenly feels risky. A wage-and-hour issue surfaces. Or a...

Labor Day Is About People We spend a lot of time talking about work as though it is separate from the rest of life. It isn’t. People come to work carrying everything with them: grief, fear, divorce, sick parents, sick children, financial stress, new babies, bad news,...

Last week, my daughter lost her horse, Weston, without any notice. I have rewritten that sentence about 10 times because there really isn’t a way to capture what happened. Weston wasn’t just a horse E. rode. He was her partner. They had been together for six years....