A Los Angeles jury has awarded a former UCLA oncologist $13 million in damages in a gender discrimination case. Dr. Lauren Pinter-Brown claimed that while she was working at UCLA, she was subjected to harsher treatment than her male colleagues and that when she did complain about her treatment, her employer retaliated against her. The…
Just as forming a business partnership under California law requires completion of certain tasks, ending a partnership is also a process. General partnerships, where there is no specific end date, must be dissolved using three basic steps. These steps apply when partners voluntarily agree to dissolve the partnership. Where partners cannot agree, legal action is…
In California, a law exists to help regulate competition between different types of businesses: the California Unfair Competition Law (UCL). One of the main objectives of the UCL is to reduce the amount of false advertising that takes place in certain industries. Defining Unfair Competition in California
Companies sometimes dismiss trade secrets as a significant form of intellectual property because unlike patents, copyrights or trademarks, trade secrets are not publicly recognized or registered with the government. Indeed, every aspect of the trade secret depends on just that, secrecy. Once a trade secret becomes known, the value is lost (and a business generally…
Workers’ compensation insurance is a type of liability insurance where the employer assumes complete liability for all worker injuries and in California, all businesses with one or more employees must provide workers’ compensation benefits to their employees (California Labor Code Section 3700). Since the purpose of worker’s compensation is to help workers if they are…
Terminating and/or firing employees is an often dreaded task faced by employers in all industries and lay offs are no different. Unfortunately, at some point in the business life cycle, financial difficulties may mean a business owner needs to lay off employees – and do so in a manner that does not result in legal…
Generally speaking, joint employment, or co-employment, is the sharing of control and supervision of an employee’s activity among two or more business entities. A benefit of the increasingly popular employment practice is the ease with which joint employers are often able to hire experts in niche industries, individuals with specialist skills, and/or even replace their…
Are non-compete agreements truly a thing of the past in California? It seems that the California Supreme Court would like employers to think so. After all, in 2008 the Court brought down the hammer on these covenants not to compete (a clause under which one party (usually an employee) agrees not to enter into or…
These days, it seems that Uber can’t stay out of the news. From wage and hour claims (were drivers being misclassified as independent contractors instead of employees? Read more on the distinction between the two here) to vicious assaults (by both drivers and passengers), the ride-sharing app has had its time in the limelight.
In 2016, Assembly Bill No. 1732, also known as the “All-Gender” Bathroom Bill (Bathroom Bill), was introduced to the California legislature and subsequently signed into law by Governor Brown. The Bathroom Bill was sponsored by California NOW, Equality California, and the Transgender Law Center because “restrict[ing] access to single-occupancy restrooms by gender create problems of…