Just a quick reminder to employers to PRESERVE THEIR RECORDS when litigation is not only pending but also threatened.

If you wait until the sheriff serves you with a summons and complaint, you may have waited too long. "Threatened" includes getting a demand letter from an attorney, or receiving an administrative charge or complaint, or any reasonably objective indication that legal ...

Where are we these days with respect to mind-altering substances and the workplace? Here's the latest, with the "substances" discussed in alphabetical order. This blog post is guaranteed accurate™ for at least the next five minutes.

ALCOHOL. Alcohol is legal, which means that it is generally recognized as the most abused of substances. Employers can prohibit its use in the ...

No, not that kind of egg.

This kind of egg:

Eggs - human eggs, aka ova - have been in the news this week. First, it was announced that Facebook and Apple will begin offering insurance coverage for female employees to freeze their eggs for later fertilization and implantation, a procedure that can cost as much as $20,000. There are mixed feelings about this - on the one hand, some women ...

Brandon Coats was partially paralyzed in a car crash as a teenager, using a wheelchair, and has been a medical marijuana patient since 2010 when he discovered that using pot helped calm violent seizures and muscle spasms. Coats was a telephone call-center operator with Dish Network for three years before he failed a cheek-swab random drug test in 2010 and was fired. Dish Network has a ...

Oddities, weirdness, and the strange and unusual from the world of employment law.

I thought only elephants had two-year pregnancies. As I've discussed here before, "pregnancy" for purposes of the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act includes a lot of things besides the actual nine months of physical gestation. Arguably, it includes the period that a woman may be receiving in ...

An article by Lauren Weber and Rachel Feintzeig in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal caught a lot of attention -- it was about companies that have made the decision to do without a Human Resources function.

The idea drew some positive response on Twitter:

HR stifles innovation and bogs down businesses with inefficient policies and processes. http://t.co/5cGRIwHaxR

— Mike Brice ...

Well! OK!

It's been an interesting week, hasn't it? Congratulations to President Obama on winning a second term. My Election 2012 coverage would not be complete without some labor and employment prognostications for Obama Administration II.*

*Please do not read these again in 2016 to see how accurate I was. I don't want to be known as the Dick Morris of employment law bloggers.

It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.

In any event, that must be what the American Medical Association is thinking. The organization took it on the chin this week in a case involving the Family and Medical Leave Act.

The case is well worth a post-mortem because of what it teaches employers about "causation" in retaliation and protected concerted ...