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Quick Hits A claim for damages based on termination-related fault may arise only if the employer’s serious breach of contract would have justified extraordinary termination without notice. An employer may be liable for misconduct among coworkers only if the employee acted as the employer’s vicarious agent, for example as a supervisor with authority to issue instructions, or if the conduct had a close factual connection to assigned job duties. Furthermore,…

Quick Hits The D.C. Circuit’s July 2026 ruling in Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund v. M&K Employee Solutions affirmed most of an $11.4 million withdrawal liability judgment against affiliated employee-leasing entities while reversing a $1.6 million delinquent contributions judgment because the pension fund failed to establish the full four-factor single-employer test beyond common ownership. Business owners participating in multiemployer pension plans face potential personal liability under the MPPAA’s…

Quick Hits The ArbG Berlin found that a nonbinary person’s employment application was not genuinely aimed at obtaining the position and therefore dismissed the subsequent compensation claim as an abuse of rights. Whether a disadvantage had occurred remained open because the court dismissed the claim on the basis of abuse of rights. Protection of nonbinary persons against discrimination remains unaffected. The Case—Binary Job Posting and Rejection With an Incorrect Salutation…

Quick Hits The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the 2023 Opposition Amendment, which permitted the state attorney general to more easily effectuate NJFCA lawsuits based on public disclosures, applied retroactively to pending cases. The court held that the Opposition Amendment was a procedural change that applied retroactively because it altered only how the state attorney general could overcome the NJFCA’s “public disclosure bar” (a doctrine that precludes actions by…

Quick Hits On June 30, 2026, New Jersey Governor Sherrill signed legislation that bans the sale of sensitive consumer data by nearly all individuals and entities, with limited exceptions for HIPAA-covered entities and Gramm-Leach-Bliley-covered financial institutions. Violators of the sensitive data sale ban face civil penalties of $50,000 for each record sold, offered for sale, or licensed. Data brokers and data collectors must register with the New Jersey Division of…

The settlement arrives as the SBA is simultaneously overhauling the eligibility standards for its 8(a) Business Development Program, moving away from race-based presumptions of social disadvantage toward a new, discrimination-based test. Together, these developments underscore why businesses participating in SBA set-aside programs must stay current on evolving eligibility rules and ensure their certifications are well-documented to avoid inadvertent misrepresentations that could expose them to FCA liability. Quick Hits The DOJ…

Quick Hits Colorado now prohibits employers from retaining original versions of employee government identification documents for longer than ten hours. There is an express carveout for employers making and retaining copies of government identification documents. Employers must notify employees of the new prohibitions on retaining government identification documents when employment eligibility is verified, even if the employer does not require or retain original identification documents. Violations of the new law…

Quick Hits The WHD issued two companion opinion letters, FLSA2026-9 and FLSA2026-10, that together explain how it analyzes whether commute and pre-commute time is compensable under the FLSA. The unifying test is the “primary beneficiary” analysis—time predominantly for the employer’s benefit is work, time predominantly for the employee’s benefit is not—applied to the totality of the circumstances. FLSA2026-9 recognizes the ordinary commute as a third category of noncompensable time that…

Quick Hits The D.C. Circuit ruled that the NLRB’s “successor bar” rule violates the NLRA when it forces employers to recognize unions despite evidence of lack of majority support. The ruling reinforces employees’ rights to choose their representatives or to be union-free and challenges the NLRB’s authority to create additional barriers to change or remove union representation. This decision signals increased judicial scrutiny of NLRB decision-making, following the Supreme Court’s…