New England Biz Law Update

Summary judgment should not have been granted to an insurer that claimed an employer knowingly and intentionally deceived it into retroactively reinstating a canceled policy so as to cover a claimed workers’ compensation injury, the Workers’ Compensation Court Appellate Division ...

A former worker for a Chinese restaurant chain could satisfy the numerosity requirement for certification of a class action claim for unpaid “reporting pay,” even though the number of putative class members was unclear, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ...

A Massachusetts resident who provided outside sales services to a Taiwanese manufacturer was misclassified as an independent contractor and entitled to Wage Act protections, a U.S. District Court judge has found. In a 2002 contract, defendant Powertech Industrial Co. agreed ...

A former Honeywell employee’s disability discrimination lawsuit was barred by her consistent assertion of total disability in pursuing Social Security Disability Income benefits, a divided panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled. Plaintiff Mayra F. Pena ...

A former graduate student’s lawsuit claiming that Rhode Island College violated his rights to freedom of speech and expression and retaliated against him for his conservative viewpoints raises questions for a jury to decide and therefore should have survived the ...

A financial consultant who allegedly compiled a list of his former clients from memory after leaving the company to join a competitor could be considered to have used confidential information, a Massachusetts Superior Court judge has found. Defendant Devin Callinan, ...

A contractor’s breach of contract claim against the company that created preliminary designs for a project should be dismissed because the contractor was not an intended beneficiary of the contract between the company and the owner of the project, a ...

A federal judge has resurrected payroll reporting guidelines adopted during the Obama administration that require large employers to break down wages and salaries according to the sex, race and ethnicity of their employees. On March 4, U.S. District Court Judge ...

Adopting the “Restatement rule” for assessing whether or not a duty exists between an accountant and an aggrieved third party, the Rhode Island Supreme Court has ruled that an accounting firm could not be liable for a report relied on ...

A shareholder/physician who was terminated from a medical group could bring a breach-of-fiduciary-duty claim against its president, a Superior Court judge in Massachusetts recently ruled. Plaintiff Stephen Punzak was an anesthesiologist in an 83-person professional corporation, defendant Anesthesia Associates of ...