Hot dawg! Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete has been named by Vault.com as the best law firm in the country for women lawyers and the best law firm in the country for minority lawyers. Heather Owen has the whole wonderful story at FOCUS, our women's leadership blog. This latest honor comes on the heels of our having been named by the National Law Journal as fourth best law firm for ...

The U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Steel have settled their OSHA retaliation lawsuit over the suspension of two employees who failed to comply with the company's "Immediate Reporting Policy," which required employees to report workplace injuries and illnesses . . . immediately. That's nice, but it's even nicer that the settlement, which is publicly available, includes a new ...

Is a former employee stealing your data so that he can start competing with you? Can he get around his obligations by borrowing a password, or by having his partners in crime do it? You may have a friend in the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Billy Hammel of our Dallas Office and Susan Bassford Wilson of our St. Louis Office have a good breakdown of the recent decision in United States ...

A number of employers and employer groups -- including the National Association of Manufacturers and Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc. -- filed suit last week in a federal court in Texas seeking to block parts of the new OSHA rule set to take effect in August.

UPDATE (7/14/16): OSHA has announced that it is going to delay enforcement of the anti-retaliation provisions of its ...

Well, maybe not light reading, but good reading about good news that you won't want to miss! Here are our bulletins and other publications from the last week, in case you missed them:

*Heather Owen is already shooting off Fourth of July fireworks at the FOCUS women's leadership blog because our firm was named this week by the National Law Journal as the fourth best law firm in the ...

My first job out of college was as a non-exempt clerical, and I wasn't a very "good fit." The work aside, I chafed at the rigid rules about start times-stop times-breaks-lunch hours-quitting times. If there was some work that I wanted to finish up and it was "lunch time," I couldn't take the extra 15 minutes needed to get it done. I had to stop right then and there, and go to lunch, or at least ...

"Do this, don't do that, can't you read the rules . . ."*

Of course, the mega-topic this week was the U.S. Department of Labor's Final Rule on white-collar exemptions to the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Ellen Kearns, co-chair of our Wage and Hour Practice Group, wrote a great Client Bulletin on the Rule, taking a complex subject and explaining it in a pithy and ...

BREAKING NEWS:  CALIFORNIA FALLS INTO THE SEA!

Well, not exactly.  But some natural phenomena occur only once or twice in a lifetime—like Halley’s Comet, or the turn of the Millennium, or the Mets winning the pennant.  Another one happened today:  the FLSA has become more protective or workers than California law, which is ordinarily the nation’s statistical outlier in the ...

Vice President Joe Biden is expected to announce the official release of the U.S. Department of Labor's new overtime rule this afternoon in an appearance at Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream in Columbus, Ohio. I'll post the rule, which will change the white-collar overtime exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act, as soon as it's available. Meanwhile, the DOL has already released the ...

No one is immune from wage-hour payouts. Not even a Human Resources consultant.

California HR consulting firm TriNet has reportedly agreed to pay approximately $1 million in overtime and liquidated damages to 267 employees. The payment is in settlement of a wage-hour investigation conducted by the San Francisco office of the U.S. Department of Labor.

According to the DOL ...