DontWorryBeYesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the EEOC has a duty to conciliate that has go a bit beyond words before filing suit as a party.  In the case, EEOC v. Mach Mining (download here), the employer argued that the EEOC cannot just say that it has tried to resolve the matter through conciliation;

My colleague Peter Murphy and I have been talking a lot about background checks lately.  It’s easier than ever to run a basic Internet search on someone, but what information do you find? And are there any limts?

Today, Peter talks about two recent settlements of background check claims against employers. Both cost the employers

Late Friday, you might have (ok, I’m sure you did) missed a press release from the United States Department of Justice announcing a settlement with a staffing agency in California.

The charge? That a staffing company “discriminated against work-authorized non-U.S. citizens in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).”

Now, I’m sure you all


Your former employee files suit against your company in federal court in Connecticut claiming that she is entitled to overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act.   You go to a settlement conference before a magistrate judge. After a few hours of back and forth negotiation, you reach a settlement with the ex-employee.

Is judicial approval

Last year, the General Assembly considered changes to the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. That bill did not receive a final vote. This year, it’s back but recently died in the Judiciary Committee, according to the CBIA.  Will it get attached to another bill? Will it be tweaked further this fall in preparation for next year’s term? My colleague, Christopher Parkin, chimes in with the details and why employers need to keep an eye on any proposed changes.

The ink is still drying on the most recent round of changes at the CHRO, the massive amendments known as PA 11-237 (in fact, the CHRO website still points to old versions of the General Statutes), but the legislature has been grappling with proposed changes to the statutes that govern the CHRO in the last few months.

These amendments, Senate Bill 385, represent a considerable effort to clean up antiquated language and recodify the statutes to make them more accessible to the public.    

Among the hundreds of technical amendments built into the bill are plenty of new substantive changes that employers and their counsel will need to become familiar with.  Recently the CBIA has noted that this particular effort has seemed to die in committee; however, the bill is likely to reappear at one point or another. Here are the details and the impact on employers when this is considered again.  

Investigator and mediator will no longer be the same person

The CHRO has long been criticized for its practice of combining the mediation and investigation process by assigning a single investigator to handle both duties, a process the Commission has insisted is a function of insufficient funding.  Until recently, mediations and fact findings were very frequently held consecutively in one marathon day. 

Nobody is best served when these processes are combined.  Neither employers nor employees can fully trust the confidentiality of the mediation process when the mediator will be tasked with soliciting testimony a few hours later if the case doesn’t settle. 

It’s also not fair to the investigators to expect that they can fully partition their brain between mediation and investigation to conduct both appropriately.


Continue Reading A New “CAR” And Other Proposed Changes to CHRO – Can They Get It Right?

Giving claims a final resting place

A few days ago, I came across a thoughtful post from Work Matters, a longtime blog run by Michael Maslanka.

In it, Mike describes a clause in a settlement agreement to get around an issue that sometimes arises — how do you minimize the

For those of us that have been practicing for a while, it had seemed that the days of the big settlements for race discrimination cases were behind us.

After all, when the Coca-Cola and Texaco settlements were announced back in the late 1990s and 2000, many companies took notice.

But the news today is

In my presentations on social media this year, I’ve talked a bit about the Phonedog v. Kravitz case where an employer sued a former employee who continued to use the company Twitter account he had started.

Are Your Accounts Under Lock & Key?

When the employee left, he merely changed the

How many times do you have to win?

That’s a question that employers may ask themselves when dealing with employment cases because the fact is, a enterprising litigant can make things quite expensive on the thinnest of facts. 

Zombie Lawsuits?

Indeed, employers may be wondering if these cases are like