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Although many companies today have adopted sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies, in court they have proven surprisingly hard to enforce. This is a lose-lose situation for both the employee and the company. As in-house counsel, you can help everyone do better. Learn how to rewrite your company's policy and, better yet, adopt an anti-discrimination certification mark. These changes will enhance the corporate image and even limit liability in the process.

In a digital age with a free flow of information, it is easy to diminish the value of personal data. The European Commission, however, is set to solidify and unify data protection laws within the European Union under the General Data Protection regulation, and American companies with operations or customers in the European Union will soon find themselves having to comply with a new set of laws that could increase the cost of doing business, as well as significantly impact business operations.

Without the guarantee of privileged communication, it is difficult for in-house counsel to effectively render legal advice to management. It is absolutely essential that counsel consider how a court will analyze privilege in order to ensure that sensitive communications remain confidential. If not, prepare to wave that privilege goodbye.

Companies can use legal analytics to select and manage outside counsel, craft successful case strategy and drive results. Learn how to use data in the context of patent litigation and prosecution activity.

The key to networking is not who can get the most business cards, but rather who can develop meaningful relationships that will ultimately contribute to long-term success.

Sample employee intellectual property assignment agreement

There’s training, and then there’s effective training. This course will look at the three main characteristics of effective training: risk based, business based, and accommodating adult learning styles. Experienced faculty will address how to build an effective training plan based on these three components. The course will also look at the practical aspects of balancing e-learning with live training to make the best use of your budget and employee time; creating “mix and match” modules and facilitator guides to get the most use from your efforts; leveraging internal resources to deliver training that is meaningful to the audience; and measuring and acting on training effectiveness.

The scope of due diligence is expanding in response to the focus on data privacy and security. Find out what you need to know about privacy (through the information lifecycle) for due diligence in mergers and acquisitions and the barriers to collecting and reviewing private information in due diligence. Examine due diligence requests (privacy policies, guidelines, data classifications, security controls) and get suggestions on which members of your due diligence team need to be involved in this effort. Examine limits to gathering, processing and reviewing all of the information you would like to see as you make your decision on whether the deal presents (too much) risk.

The European Unified Patent Court (UPC) – which centralizes patent litigation throughout most of the EU – is on track to go live in late 2016 or early 2017. The new UPC is expected to rival and potentially surpass US courts as the preferred venue for major patent disputes, as US companies will be able to obtain an EU-wide injunction via a single litigation, instead of having to litigate in each jurisdiction. This will drastically reduce costs and improve enforcement, but it won’t be easy. The new system and the changes in procedure and process are complex. Companies must assess multiple factors to decide in advance whether to participate or opt-out. This panel comprised of lawyers dually qualified in the US and UK will focus on how the UPC will impact IP filing and enforcement strategies of US companies, and answer questions such as: What strategic planning should US companies be doing now to prepare for the UPC?; What are the best practices to protect US companies’ patent portfolios in Europe?; What are the commercial advantages of opting-in or out of the UPC?; How will early UPC participants shape the new court system?; How do US companies decide whether to opt-in or opt-out?; How do US companies approach product clearance and FTO in Europe, particularly as applied in licensing and acquisitions?; What are the options for mitigating significant competitor patent risk before it is exacerbated by the UPC?

Appendix A to the 2012 Corporate Counsel University, Session 700- Adding Value: Strategic Planning and Demonstrating Success. It contains strategic business planning questions.

This 16 March 2016, held in Brisbane, outlines how in-house counsel can effectively managing risk in commercial contracts.

This is a sample code of business conduct and ethics policy.

Explains how corporate counsel can implement effective legal training programs as required by the U.S. Sentencing Commission Guidelines.

With new developments in social media, obscurity is starting to disappear. And while this may not change the world, it should change the way you think about communication.

This study explores the changing role of the general counsel by documenting its evolution and predicting the skill sets that will be required for future general counsel to be successful. Central themes to this skill set include the ability to place legal issues in a larger business context, embrace risk and make decisions, communicate with business partners in language they can relate to, and work seamlessly with the executive team and the board of directors to make productive decisions about operations and strategy, which has become increasingly global in scope. The report includes an executive summary, key findings, interview excerpts and the methodology.

Thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, public companies face potential civil and criminal liability and new internal reporting obligations. Read this article to prepare your company to respond if a whistleblowing complaint comes in.

Social media can be a challenging environment for in-house counsel. In this article, in-house counsel can learn how information on social media platforms can be used ethically in their practice.

Compliance is difficult enough when a company operates in just one country. But difficulties become much greater when a company operates in many. Here are some resources for creating effective global compliance programs that support your company's business goals.

A discussion on subjects such as emissions, general guidelines for voluntary greenhouse gas reporting, proposed rules, and more.

Labor and employment laws in the United Kingdom are notoriously employee-friendly. Learn how to navigate the minefield of disciplining, and ultimately dismissing, UK employees.

This is a sample software database license agreement.

This resource is a detailed statement of corporate policies for social media usage.

Employers monitor off-site employees for numerous reasons—not simply to ensure productivity, but to protect trade secrets, avoid data breaches, track an employee’s physical location, and generally discourage or identify misconduct. Most recently, monitoring has been used for COVID-19-related contact tracing purposes. However, privacy-related legal pitfalls abound.

If the weather outside mimicked the economic outlook for corporate America, it would be overcast with periods of heavy rain. With a tough financial forecast, even tougher leadership decisions have to be made, and a layoff or reduction-in-force (RIF) may be the most feasible solution to save your bottom line. While there's no easy way to execute a RIF, this article gives insightful information to help make a layoff less painstaking and more profitable to your company.

The beginning of a shift toward a more regulatory and less litigation-oriented regime of antitrust enforcement was observable by the mid-1990s, if not earlier. The transition
toward this more bureaucratic approach by antitrust enforcement agencies is the subject of our analysis.

In the midst of all of the corporate scandals that have erupted since the Enron bankruptcy filing last year and in light of the new requirements established by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, what do in-house counsel of public companies need to do both to protect their clients (the corporation, its officers, employees, and shareholders) and themselves? Read this article to get a better grasp of the scope of the problem and use the five-point compliance plan to help plan a solution.