New England Biz Law Update

 “Directors are like parsley on fish — decorative but useless.” — Irving Olds, former chairman of Bethlehem Steel In litigation decided in May by the Delaware Supreme Court, minority shareholders (who were frozen out through a merger engineered by a ...

The federal government is taking aggressive action through various enforcement agencies to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. These efforts affect private employers, public employers and federal contractors. Accordingly, all employers should review their policies and procedures ...

Medicinal use of marijuana has been decriminalized throughout New England. The first Massachusetts medical marijuana dispensary opened its doors on June 24. It is now clear that medical marijuana is quickly becoming an everyday aspect of health care delivery in ...

As all in-house attorneys know, in most transactions of any complexity, the parties first execute a letter of intent, or LOI, or other preliminary document before proceeding to sign a final agreement. These so-called “pre-contractual agreements” usually outline important deal ...

On any given workday, we all deal with a wide spectrum of human behavior. At one time or another, we have all been on the giving and receiving ends of idiosyncratic — even uncomfortable — workplace conduct. A recent trend ...

“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” — REM song title We enter now into the mature phase of considering cyber risk. We have seen the costly devastation most recently caused by cyber ...

On March 25, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major rebuke to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by unanimously rejecting the EEOC’s most recent, and supposedly comprehensive, guidance on pregnancy discrimination enforcement. The rebuke was delivered in Young v. United ...

Having been on the books for nearly a quarter-century, the Americans With Disabilities Act is well known to employers and employees alike. Virtually all are aware that employers have a legal obligation to provide a reasonable accommodation (that is, some ...

Delaware has fully articulated case law defining fiduciary duties owed by owners and directors, and a rich tapestry of judicial decisions raising almost every imaginable factual scenario. Two recent decisions demonstrate the increasing complexity of the Delaware law. Bugs in ...

New England employers should be aware that people who lack authorization to work in the United States are nonetheless protected under most employment laws, including discrimination and wage-and-hour statutes. A recent court decision in California illustrates this. In Salas v. ...