At long last, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced that it will begin accepting applications for employment authorization documents for the dependent spouses of H1B visa holders (“H4”) under certain circumstances. This news is welcome for the thousands of intending immigrants who are in long ...
On Thursday, Walmart announced several changes to its compensation and benefits structure—the most noticeable being its hourly wage increase. Walmart states that, by April 2015, its entry-level wage will start at $9 an hour, and it will go up to $10 an hour by early 2016.
Other new measures include additional training and ...
By Will Gibbons
Could a case on the boxing classic Raging Bull lead to a patent litigation prizefight of sorts? In an en banc hearing ordered on December 30, 2014, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, a federal appellate court with special jurisdiction over patents and trademarks, will decide whether the Supreme Court’s essential elimination of ...
On February 4, 2015, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released enforcement and litigation statistics for fiscal year 2014. A total of 88,778 workplace discrimination charges were filed in 2014, which is down slightly from prior years. Retaliation charges were at an all-time high and ...
On Monday, in M&G Polymers USA, LLC v. Tackett, No. 13-1010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that ambiguous provisions in union contracts should not be automatically interpreted in favor of a company’s retired workers. The case concerned a union contract from the 1990s that provided free health care benefits to the retirees of ...
Inter Partes Review (“IPR”) is a trial proceeding established by the America Invents Act that started in September 2012. Conducted before the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (“Board”), IPR allows an interested party to challenge claims in a patent for obviousness or lack of novelty, based on prior art patents or ...
By Carl Eppler
It may not seem intuitive to connect intellectual property rights with a human tragedy, but indeed, the two intersect more often than we realize. This is likely not the proper forum to opine on the propriety of such an intersection, or the motives of those who mine its connections, but it is a topic ripe for discussion because it is so ...
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down the U.S. Department of Labor’s regulations concerning the companionship services exemption to the minimum wage and overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). See Home Care Association of America v. Weil, No. 14-cv-967 (D.D.C. 2014 ...
On Wednesday, January 7, 2015, the Sixth Circuit issued a published opinion in Ruffin v. MotorCity Casino, affirming the district court’s decision that security guards at MotorCity Casino were not entitled to overtime payments under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. 207(a). In doing so, the Sixth Circuit held that ...
By Edwin S. Hopson
On January 5, 2015, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States and several other business groups filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C. against the National Labor Relations Board attacking the NLRB’s recent final rule which significantly changes the NLRB’s representation procedures to speed up the holding of ...