06/18/2010
A former partner at Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell has filed a lawsuit accusing the law firm of breaching his employment contract, violating the labor code, fraud, negligent misrepresentation and libel and slander.
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06/18/2010
A federal court has ruled that an arbitration agreement—even an admittedly oppressive one—can be enforced in California if it’s drafted broadly enough.
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06/14/2010
Employers looking to discourage their employees from going to work for a competitor, take note! As a general matter, courts aren’t in favor of noncompete agreements. Nevertheless, Illinois employers may now have a new weapon to keep employees from taking your secrets when they leave.
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06/09/2010
Q. We are considering hiring an employee away from one of our competitors. Should we ask whether she is subject to a noncompete agreement, or is it better for us to move forward not knowing the answer?
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06/09/2010
Employers and their lawyers often favor mandatory arbitration of employment claims for two reasons: It’s a cost-effective alternative to court, and it’s an insurance policy against runaway jury verdicts. Arbitration, however, can often prove just as costly as court. Thus, while many employers continue to favor arbitration to limit their potential exposure in front of a jury, others have begun to consider alternatives.
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05/14/2010
Is arbitration the best forum in which employers should try to resolve statutory claims. Significantly, some employers have begun to abandon mandatory arbitration in recent years. Here are some of the issues employers must consider when deciding whether to require arbitration of employees’ statutory claims.
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05/14/2010
Once you’ve made the tough decision to terminate an employee, stick to it. If you let the employee talk you into reconsidering, you may end up with a lawsuit over whether a contract had been created.
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05/11/2010
It’s a situation that happens more often than you might think: An employer finds out that one of its employees is preparing to leave and set up her own shop. But is the employer handcuffed, unable to do anything about the upstart competitor because this employee didn’t sign a noncompetition agreement?
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04/28/2010
There’s good news for New Jersey employers that use arbitration agreements to keep workplace disagreements out of court. Courts often find arbitration agreements valid, even if the employee who signed it was in a take-it-or-leave-it position. What’s more, courts won’t toss out an agreement just because a small section may be invalid. Instead, they’ll strike the invalid parts and leave the rest intact.
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04/28/2010
There’s a flood of employment law litigation sweeping the nation. Blame the recession. Employment-related cases are clogging court dockets at the state and federal levels. The EEOC is fielding more and more employment discrimination claims. Facing these realities, alternative dispute resolution is becoming increasingly popular as parties look for more efficient, less expensive conflict-resolution mechanisms. Arbitration is the type of alternative dispute resolution that’s attracting the most attention.
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04/19/2010
There’s hope for employers victimized by competitors who attempt to poach corporate all-stars. If some other organization tries to unethically steal your best employees, you may have a remedy—even if you haven’t made employees sign noncompete agreements (which aren’t usually enforceable in California anyway).
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04/15/2010
In the wake of a recent Illinois court decision in Citadel Investment Group, LLC v. Teza Technologies LLC, employers should rethink their noncompete agreements. Without fine tuning, these contracts may not work as well as they could.
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04/02/2010
Drafting a collective-bargaining agreement isn’t a do-it-yourself project. You have to make sure that the language in the union contract does what you intend it to do. For that, you should consult an experienced labor-relations attorney.
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03/11/2010
With the enactment of the Franken Amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act for FY 2010, Congress and the Obama administration have begun an assault on employers’ use of mandatory arbitration as an alternative to court trials for resolving workplace disputes and claims. Employers have been asking whether other alternatives to jury trials will exist in the absence of arbitration. One alternative that companies can consider: entering into waivers of civil jury trials with their employees.
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03/11/2010
Q. We would like to hire an applicant who used to work for a similar company, but he has a noncompete agreement with his former employer. We think the noncompete is way too broad—it lasts for three years and prevents him from working anywhere in the country—and we do not believe the work he will be doing competes with any activities of his former employer. Can we go ahead and hire him?
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