LEGAL
The Insider: Working from home – can it really work for in-house counsel?
More and more employers are affording their employees the ability to work from home, or “remotely,” as it is sometimes called. Studies show pretty convincingly that not only does the flexibility to work from home increase employee productivity and morale, it also heightens the company’s ability to attract and retain key talent. While work from home is growing, it is not growing as quickly at in-house legal departments. As a former GC, I will be the first to say that I was very reluctant when we first started allowing our in-house lawyers to work from home.
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In-house lawyer’s intro to trade secrets
When it comes to intellectual property, everyone talks patents. Trademarks, copyrights, and other bits of intellectual property are scattered about. Less known is the trade secret. Trade secret law mostly gets invoked in the context of employment law. What key factors should in-house lawyers be aware of when it comes to this lesser-known aspect of intellectual property?
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Adding value by designing effective compliance programs
In today’s business world, all companies, regardless of their size, business model, and scope of activities, must understand and comply with a plethora of laws and regulations. Companies need to respond to their legal environment by proactively implementing policies and procedures to comply with those laws and regulations that are most relevant to their specific activities. In other words, companies need “compliance programs” almost from the moment they are formed.
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Beyond legal spend metrics: KPIs for the efficient legal department
Immediately after the global financial crisis, when all eyes were on expense management, general counsel often reported exclusively on outside counsel and external spend management. But now that nearly a decade has passed from this watershed moment for the legal industry, have legal departments changed course in the metrics and KPIs they collect to demonstrate the contributions of the department? What more can the general counsel celebrate other than her ability to better manage outside counsel?
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CFTC’s proposed rule continuing trend of expansive whistleblower incentives
At the end of August, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) paid out more than $22 million from the agency’s whistleblower program to an executive who disclosed accounting improprieties to the commission. If nothing else, this latest award demonstrates that the SEC is as serious as ever about encouraging whistleblowers to come forward. And it appears that at least one other agency is following suit.
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Risk-based approach to KYC
When Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) legislation came onto the scene in the early 1990s, one might say it lacked finesse – it was highly prescriptive in nature, leaving little room for interpretation. Within a decade, it started to become clear that one size actually didn’t fit all. And then came the Risk-Based Approach (RBA), a logical new approach to managing risk.
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New corporate governance principles • Online reviews and endorsements • Ensuring arbitration for employee disputes
Learn how the recently issued Commonsense Principles of Corporate Governance (Governance Principles) apply to your organization and circumstances, and how potentially difficult it is to enforce arbitration for inter-employee disputes. Plus the new guidelines regarding online review and endorsements from the International Consumer Protection Enforcement Network, an organization that consists of the FTC and consumer protection agencies from more than 50 other countries.
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Top 10 tips for calculating the regular rate under the FLSA
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) generally requires overtime compensation of at least 1.5 times an employee’s regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek. The regular rate is calculated as an hourly rate, but it does not necessarily equal the employee’s customary hourly wage or salary. The regular rate includes all compensation paid to (or on behalf of) employees, except for certain exclusions expressly permitted by the FLSA. If employers fail to show that the statutory requirements for exclusion have been satisfied, they may be liable for additional overtime compensation.
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