When a company hires an employee away from a competitor, alarms are likely to go off for the in-house counsel. The new employee may be on the up and up, but what happens if your competitor claims that they stole confidential, proprietary, and trade secret information––transferring it all through their email––and are now subpoenaing your company’s computers? Technological advances have made the transferring of such data easy for employees who move around so frequently and in-house attorneys need to know how to respond while protecting their company’s own confidential information.
Read this 2009 Communicator Award-winning column!<br/>The Streisand Effect encapsulates a phenomenon that derives from a case that involved Barbra herself; by attempting to squelch information you can inadvertently make it wildly popular. In-house attorneys have been dealing with the Streisand Effect for years, and the introduction of the internet changed the venue.
Today’s global economy, along with competition overseas, is making the collective bargaining process between companies and unions challenging. When an agreement that satisfies the union cannot be met, a strike can commence— often resulting in lengthy labor disputes. How do attorneys navigate the complex process of labor negations? This case study, highlighting an 18-month strike at Cognis Corp., sheds light on what your company might consider if you’re ever face-to-face with a picket line.
Ron Pol outlines eight points on how to effectively management litigation media.
Bribes of any kind are wrong, right? Well, not the small "facilitation payments" allowed under the FCPA exception. Learn why making these small payments can lead to big problems and ways that companies can implement and enforce a policy against all bribes.
This article describes how to analyze legal risk.
The human resources ("HR") audit is a valuable tool in the in-house counsels risk management toolbox. It can help you to identify and correct weaknesses in HR practices and processes before someone mishandles or overlooks an employment situation, possibly giving rise to litigation. This article gives you practical pointers on how to launch an HR audit, specifically, how to make the business case to your company decision makers, how to select the people who will perform the audit, how to make the audit thorough and meaningful, and how to make effective use of what the audit reveals.
This article discusses how you can ensure that your company is ready for an OSHA inspection. Learn how to prepare your facilities so that your company is in the best position to defend itself.
If your company operates in the area of hazardous materials, you need to have a comprehensive plan in place to deal with sudden environmental emergencies. This article describes the fundamentals of a comprehensive emergency plan that deals with environmental disasters and presents the precise steps that should be taken, on an hour-by-hour basis, to implement the plan following a disaster.
In-house counsel today exist in a vortex of competing and ever-changing legal requirements, regulatory schemes, technological developments, and budgetary constraints. This article tells you how to integrate technology into your legal department to simplify the task of thriving among these diverse and often contradictory forces, how to examine your internal processes, and how to implement technology to solve existing problems.