Although many employees describe what they face at work as a “hostile work environment,” frequently what they are experiencing or observing is evidence of another type of workplace discrimination. It is therefore important for employees who believe they are experiencing discrimination in the workplace—and the lawyers who represent them—to look closely and carefully at all […]

The longest federal shutdown in U.S. history is having devastating effects, placing hundreds of thousands of federal workers in economic peril and potentially crippling the delivery of basic services for Native American tribes. It has also shut down the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), delaying Americans from receiving justice where their employers have illegally […]

How did you find your current job?  Was it through an advertisement in the newspaper or another print periodical? And how about if you’re an employer looking to recruit and hire new employees?  Chances are, the answer to all of the above is: the internet.  So, if the employment advertisements that employers/employees use and view […]

California’s Private Attorney General Act of 2004 (“PAGA”) has provided employees injured by their employer’s Labor Code violations with an opportunity to seek statutory penalties on behalf of him or herself and on behalf of other aggrieved employees.  This law famously allows an individual employee to stand in the shoes of the government agency that […]

The False Claims Act (“FCA”) incentivizes whistleblowers (“relators”) to provide information to the Government that could lead to a recovery of defrauded taxpayer funds, with a share of that recovery going to the whistleblower. But sometimes a relator’s information can lead the Government to pursue claims only on its own behalf, for which there is […]

You can learn a lot from a sports blog.  Including, oddly enough, the purposes of class action lawsuits. Last month, while browsing the latest news on one of my favorite sports teams, I unexpectedly came across a dialogue on the NHL concussions lawsuit and settlement. See NHL Players Concussion Injury Litig., No. 14-md-2551 (D. Minn.), […]

“The law does not concern itself with trifles.” It’s one of those statements that sounds both reasonable and definitive. Indeed, it’s an English translation of a Latin maxim that traces back hundreds of years – “de minimis non curat lex.” I was recently reflecting on this concept – sometimes called the “de minimis” doctrine – […]

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure generally require that a publicly filed lawsuit name all the parties involved.  However, under certain circumstances, plaintiffs can avoid disclosing their name by filing a lawsuit using a pseudonym (such as “Jane Doe” or “John Doe”).  Although the use of a pseudonym commonly arises in sexual harassment cases, some […]

On November 20, 2018, the Virginia Supreme Court appointed a panel of three Circuit Court judges to consider the consolidation of lawsuits previously filed in Virginia state courts against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) for their role in creating the public health emergency caused by prescription opioids. The panel was appointed in […]

Researchers at Vanderbilt Law School have found an alarming disparity in the job satisfaction rates between recent male and female law graduates, as detailed in a forthcoming research paper in the Marquette Law Review. The researchers discovered that “recently graduated female lawyers are 19 percentage points less likely to state that they are very satisfied […]