Browse >
Home / Archive: April 2008
One of India's leading outsourcing companies is going out to find prospective workers -- on a bus. While the bus may be a recruitment gimmick, it shows the lengths India's technology outsourcing companies have to go as the industry grapples with a serious shortage of skilled labor.
Recent court decisions, Congressional legislation and foreign self-help actions appear to be aimed at transforming everyone's icon of free speech -- the Internet -- into a mere symbol of semi-free speech. How much freedom do lawyers have when blogging and participating in social networks?
If you're handing out BlackBerrys like candy in the workplace, you better have a policy in place to ward off potential overtime lawsuits. That's the advice many lawyers are shelling out to employers using hand-held devices to allow wired-up employees to work anywhere, anytime.
A woman who claimed that she is allergic to her estranged husband's cat cannot prevent their two children from visiting their father's home, a New York judge has ruled. The judge analyzed the issue in terms of harmful activities in the presence of children restricted by courts, such as smoking, but found that the cat's presence offered no legal or factual basis for similar restrictions.
Republican senators are anxious about 28 judicial nominees awaiting confirmation, the 46 total vacancies and the dwindling time left in President Bush's term to get more of his candidates on the federal bench. Of the 28 nominees waiting approval by the Senate, 10 are appellate court nominees and 18 are trial court selections. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in particular, is in the political crosshairs -- the president who fills those vacancies could shift the philosophical balance of the court.
An appellate court Tuesday upheld a jury's finding that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was more than two-thirds responsible for the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six and injured more than 1,000 people. The Port Authority's failure to implement adequate security measures in the face of repeated warnings that the structure's underground parking garage was vulnerable to an "event of potentially catastrophic magnitude" amounted to negligence, the court held.
Shearman & Sterling has announced an increase of 7 percent in London associate salaries, putting the firm's rates well ahead of those at top London firms. A newly qualified solicitor based at the firm's London office will get paid 80,000 pounds ($157,976). Shearman is the first major firm to announce salary increases this year, with a raft of U.K. and U.S. rivals set to announce theirs in coming weeks. However, few firms are expected to make major increases as advisers feel the impact of the credit crunch.
Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye wrote New York Gov. David A. Paterson on Tuesday to assure him reports of judicial "slowdown" were "without basis." On Monday, Paterson had cautioned judges against engaging in tactics that would slow litigation to press their case for a raise. In her letter, Kaye wrote, "while some judges have individually chosen to recuse themselves from matters in which legislators or their firms appeared before them, there has not been -- nor will there be -- an adverse impact on litigants."
Peter Brown -- the "Brown" in Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner -- will be leaving the firm's New York office for Baker & Hostetler. His move is the latest in a string of departures, particularly from the firm's office in New York, home to the legacy Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner firm. The Brown firm merged with San Francisco's Thelen Reid & Priest in December 2006. Thelen co-chairman Julian Millstein called the recent departures "to some extent ... a normal shakeout of the merger."
So your company loans an employee a laptop. The employee resigns, but he doesn't return the laptop. The company can certainly deduct the cost of the laptop from the employee's final paycheck, right? Wrong. While in many cases deductions like this one might appear reasonable, says attorney Jennifer Blum Feldman, the law in this area is anything but. In fact, determining whether a deduction is legally permissible requires some careful analysis under both state and federal law.
Next Page »
