The VLW Blog

Almost four years after the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act took effect, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently filed and settled the agency’s first lawsuit alleging discrimination under the law. GINA prohibits discrimination based on genetic information as well as the “acquisition” of genetic information by an employer, including an employee’s family medical history. According to [...]

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A former employee of the Bureau of National Affairs may represent a class of plaintiffs who allege they lost out when they sold company stock back to BNA at a lower share price than Bloomberg Inc. paid when it bought BNA for $990 million in September 2011. Plaintiff Judith Knight alleges the BNA board set [...]

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A lawyer being treated for sleep apnea has settled his disability discrimination suit against the Virginia State Corporation Commission. On Jan. 7, Richmond U.S. District Judge John A. Gibney refused to dismiss a suit filed by Jonathan Orne, who served as Senior Counsel and lead lawyer to the SCC’s Bureau of Financial Institutions. The next [...]

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Document custodians must track a mass of digital data, and are bound to overlook – or delete – documents that later are demanded in a lawsuit. But there are sins of omission, and sins of commission. Taking a sledgehammer to a work computer would be the latter. Alan Taylor, a “computer expert by trade,” first [...]

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An employer defending an overtime pay case can’t demand records from the employee’s past employers, unless the employer knows the employee earlier sued for violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. A Norfolk U.S. District Court said a trucking company’s subpoenas to three former employers of truck driver J. David Singletary II were overbroad On [...]

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A group of female managers who alleged pay discrimination by defendant Dollar Tree Stores Inc. could not save their suit with a claim that their request to amend their complaint tolled the limitations period to file a Title VII claim. Last week the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the managers missed the 90-day [...]

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A drug company salesman claimed gender bias after his supervisor asked if the salesman’s wife could drop off their child at school, so the salesman could start work earlier. Noah Nathan said his employer, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, discriminated against him by questioning his child-care responsibilities. Nathan’s district sales manager wanted to enforce an 8:00 a.m. start [...]

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The gender discrimination lawsuit against Chesterfield County filed by a former human resources director has lawyers trading sharp words over discovery. Karla Gerner is on a “fishing expedition” with requests for personnel records for male former administrators in the county government, the county claims in a recent brief. The county attorney also accuses Gerner’s lawyers [...]

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The EEOC can obtain five years’ worth of job assignment records from a company that deploys as many as 45,000 temporary workers on a weekly basis, in a case alleging the company illegally discriminated when it refused to reassign a temporary worker who could not read and write English. When the agency took up the [...]

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Lawsuit, what lawsuit? If Brenda Altman ever wondered what happened to the employment discrimination suit she filed in federal district court back in 2001, she apparently didn’t do anything about it. A former civilian audit assistant for a U.S. Army facility in Winchester, she sued for age and sex discrimination in the U.S. District Court [...]

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