Real Life Employment Law
Nearly every day, executives and managers, and the in-house counsel and Human Resources professionals who work with them, are confronted with unanticipated questions regarding the workforce. Just when they think they have "seen it all," along comes a new and often stranger scenario involving an odd twist to an area they thought they fully understood. These individuals often find themselves back at square one when trying to construct an appropriate response and devise a creative solution to the problem presented. Sometimes these "Quirky Questions" can be resolved easily; other times, they implicate practical and legal issues that are not immediately apparent.
This Quirky Employment Questions Blog addresses unanticipated questions regarding the workforce.
We encourage you to submit your thoughts and reactions to the questions presented. We also encourage you to submit questions that you would like to see addressed, subject to these guidelines.
Stephen D. Bell
Michael Droke
Joseph W. Hammell
Sarah Andrews Herman
Ryan E. Mick
William J. Miller
Melissa Raphan
Gregory M. Saylin
Gabrielle Wirth
David C. SingerBLOG CONTACT INFO
E: Wirth.Gabrielle@dorsey.com
P: 714.800.1455
Quirky Question # 66: One of our employees recently advised us that she and her two children were suffering from domestic violence by her husband. She requested us to provide her time off to move herself and her children out of the abusive situation at her home. Frankly, we were somewhat skeptical so we denied her request. Not long thereafter,...
Quirky Question # 50: We are a small to mid-size company, with a relatively small legal department. We have a General Counsel. He, in turn, supervises two other attorneys. The General Counsel joined our company about two years ago, and frankly, his relationship with C-level executives has not been ideal. His relationship with the CEO has been particularly strained. The...
Quirky Question # 46: We are a privately held company that runs a large software sales organization. The family that started our company and that still dominates its executive ranks has conservative values. Among those issues about which the owners feel strongly is the abortion issue. They do not believe that women should have abortions under any circumstances. One of...
Quirky Question # 45: We recently had an employee voluntarily resign because she found employment with our company “unbearable.” She then sought unemployment benefits. It is my understanding that an employee in Washington who quits is not entitled to unemployment benefits. Do we have grounds to challenge her claim?
Quirky Question # 36: We recently learned that one of our employees has illegal pornography on his work computer. We know we can discipline him (up to and including termination).The police recently requested a copy of his computer hard drive. Can we turn the hard drive over to the authorities even if they do not have a search warrant? Do...
Quirky Question # 29: Our company has offices in California. This year we want to improve our document retention practices. We’ve decided to maintain electronic records of personnel files. Can we do this in California? We were told that California law requires the records to be available at the job site. If this is true, can we switch to an...
Quirky Question # 18: We recently terminated one of our executives. One of our standard practices when we terminate a senior executive is to check carefully his/her email communications for the preceding twelve months. When we checked this executive’s email communications, we discovered approximately eight messages to and from a private law firm. The message subject line was: “Personal, My...
Quirky Question # 14: One of our employees discovered fortuitously (by Googling his own name) that a co-worker down the hall has been posting messages to a Web-blog, in which he identified the employee by name and made graphic, negative sexual observations about him. Not surprisingly, the two employees are not friends. The subject of the comments had no idea...
Quirky Question # 9: Two of our employees are involved in a romantic relationship. We recently learned that our male employee assaulted our female employee at her apartment. He was charged with domestic assault based on her report and convicted. We then tried to elicit information from our female employee about whether she felt her paramour posed a risk of...
Quirky Question # 6: Our company operates a call center. One of our supervisors (Employee X) demonstrated two significant performance problems. First, he was verbally abusive to the employees he supervised. Second, he appeared to have a disproportionate number of “dropped” calls. Our suspicion is that he put the callers on “hold,” and left them on “hold” until they hung...
Erica ChenErica is an associate in the Costa Mesa office of Dorsey & Whitney and a member of the firm’s Labor and Employ...
Jack SullivanJack is a Partner in Dorsey’s Labor & Employment group, where he focuses his practice on employment adv...
Ieva AubinAs an employment and business immigration attorney, ...
Michael DrokeMike started his career as a client, not a lawyer...
Matt DurhamMatt defends employers in Utah and throughout the ...
Aaron GoldsteinAaron is a Partner in Dorsey’s Labor & Employ...
Josh HughesJosh’s experience spans trial and appellate advoc...
Jillian KornblattJillian is a Partner in Dorsey’s Labor & Employ...
Laura LestradeLaura began practicing at Dorsey in 1992 and has s...
Ryan MickFor more than a decade, Ryan has counseled corpo...
Nick PappasNick litigates and counsels with respect to com...
Melissa RaphanMelissa is a Partner in Dorsey’s Labor and Employ...
Gabrielle WirthEmployers turn to Gabrielle for guidance on how they...
