On April 20, 2018, Judge John A. Woodcock, Jr. of the US District Court of Maine issued a well-reasoned 39 page decision granting an injunction against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from prohibiting a high school student from Zambia, seeking asylum in the US, from participating in a national poetry recital contest.  View Full Post
Two notable developments in the past few weeks signal potential changes ahead to the policies and timeframes for pipeline approvals, particularly natural gas pipelines under Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC” or the “Commission”) oversight. These developments reflect both the increased public scrutiny of the pipeline approval process seen in recent years and the emphasis placed by the current administration on expediting review and approval of major infrastructure projects, two factors that are in some tension with each other. View Full Post
The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation (“Commerce Committee”) recently held a nomination hearing to fill two vacancies on the Surface Transportation Board (“STB”), the economic regulator of railroads.  The nomination hearing of Patrick Fuchs and Michelle Schultz provided Senators with a venue to vent concerns related to the U.S. View Full Post
Data breaches have become commonplace. Despite the best efforts of many, identity thieves and hackers always seem to find a new vulnerability somewhere in the system of virtually every company that conducts business online. And, as the recent Facebook debacle reveals, sometimes data is even shared with legitimate third parties in ways customers neither realized nor anticipated. View Full Post
In recent months, sexual harassment has seized national headlines and raised significant questions about company policies, procedures, and culture. In response, many companies and HR personnel have questioned how to appropriately respond to complaints of sexual harassment. A recent decision out of the Western District of Wisconsin provides a helpful summary of the state of Title VII, the federal anti-discrimination and harassment law, and the appropriate company response to harassment. View Full Post
News outlets around the United States have picked up and expanded upon an Associated Press story about the whistleblower complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lodged against Facebook. The story has also been picked up internationally, including publications in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. View Full Post
The #MeToo movement is not finished making waves just yet. Governor Cuomo signed a 2019 Budget Bill on April 12, 2018, but the bill did not limit itself to budgetary issues. Instead, it included sweeping revisions to several statutes, resulting in several new requirements for employers doing business in New York State: view full post » View Full Post
Engineering, procurement, and construction agreements, commonly known as “EPC agreements,” are used for the construction of facilities intended to carry out a process, with the potential process being anything from manufacturing a product to generating electricity to treating wastewater.  An EPC agreement is similar to a design-build contract where the owner engages one entity to design and construct the desired facility, except an EPC agreement goes one step further in that the contractor must not only design and build the desired facility but also must design and build the facility so that it produces some guaranteed level of output. View Full Post
Leveraging Cloud Technology In this installment of our cloud blog series, we’ll discuss some of the ways that firms can leverage technologies of various cloud providers. This post intends to build on initial information from my previous post entitled What is “The Cloud.” If you have not yet seen that post, I urge you give it a read first to help better understand the terms used in this post. View Full Post
From wristbands that count your steps, to skin patches that measure your sun exposure, a wide range of products are entering the wearable-technology market and raising new questions about intellectual property (IP) claims and protection. In this hoganlovells.com interview, Katie McConnell, counsel in the Hogan Lovells London office, provides an overview of the unique challenges market players face in the highly competitive field of wearable-technology. View Full Post
In January 2018, at the Eleventh Annual International Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (the “Conference”) in Brussels, one panel that made some headlines centered around blockchain technology in the context of data protection. The core inquiry of the panel was two-fold: (1) whether blockchain technology can facilitate data protection regulatory objectives and (2) whether the same technology makes it more difficult to enforce data protection laws. View Full Post
On April 16, newly confirmed member John Ring was sworn in as the fifth member and Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, establishing a Republican-controlled Board.   While all has been relatively quiet with regard to rulings from the Board,  we will likely see a rise in activity now that the NLRB (with a  newly-minted majority) is poised to roll back some of the Obama-era rulings. View Full Post
If a proposed law is enacted by the New York City Council, employers would be prohibited from requiring employees to check and respond to email or other electronic communications during non-work hours. The bill allows for exceptions in “cases of emergency” and would require employers to publish a written policy governing work-related communications during non-work hours.  View Full Post
These days especially in view of “Arbeiten 4.0”, the so called fourth industrial revolution in Germany, digitalization pervades the whole working world and is reflected in a vast number of different phenomena. As one of them artificial intelligence can complement – and in some cases even replace – manpower as we can see in the automotive industry. View Full Post
Scientist creates faster way to fingerprint foodborne pathogens University of Georgia food scientist Xiangyu Deng has created a system that can identify subtypes of foodborne pathogens in a fraction of the time taken by traditional methods. Quick detection and pathogen fingerprinting can save lives by helping to identify foodborne illness outbreaks and their victims, thereby making it easier to contain outbreaks. View Full Post