New England Biz Law Update

Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time. — Henry Ward Beecher A recent article in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly flagged a new Supreme Judicial Court case that suggested, upon first impression, a ...

Businesses across the globe have been shuttered or disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Entire industries have been shut down, temporarily or permanently. Suppliers of goods and services, finding themselves unable to satisfy their contractual obligations, are seeking ways to limit ...

The 2018 Massachusetts noncompete law made many significant improvements to preexisting law, but garden leave is not one of them. We wrote an article in the November issue of NEIH titled “The new noncompete law: compromise happens.” In it, we ...

A dispute has arisen that cannot be settled. You turn to the parties’ contract and discover that all disputes are to be resolved by arbitration. You next file on behalf of your client a demand for arbitration. But what if ...

“That government is best which governs least.” — Henry David Thoreau My first column in New England In-House appeared on Oct. 1, 2003.  The publishers have invited me to look over the past 16 years and identify significant legal trends. ...

Under what circumstances — if any — does the National Labor Relations Act require an employer to tolerate an employee’s use of sexually or racially offensive language in the workplace, notwithstanding the employer’s anti-harassment policies and employment discrimination laws? The ...

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently settled an action through a cease and desist order against Calumet Specialty Products Partners, related to reporting misleading financial results in a quarterly press release. Calumet is a producer of specialty hydrocarbon products, headquartered ...

As trial lawyers representing employers, we have learned a great deal over time about how jurors tend to think about employment cases. Yet watching a jury deliberate during a mock trial — behind a one-way mirror — is always a ...

While seemingly quiet, the last few months have in fact comprised one of the most active periods in the annals of Delaware corporate law. I’ll review here significant developments affecting aggrieved minority shareholders in M&A transactions; expansion of fiduciary duties ...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently entered into a cease-and-desist order with Juniper Networks, Inc., related to violations of the internal controls and recordkeeping provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 through its subsidiaries operating in Russia ...