This piece of art hung in the bedroom at the apartment I rented on my recent vacation in Paris. See the shadow of the dog? Yep. See the shadow of the horse? Yep. See the shadow of the rider? Oops. I expected it to be there. Chalk up another win for bad art. Art requires creativity and, sometimes, a different perspective. Things are not always the way we expect them to be. That can be…

I took this picture last week in Paris, walking through the Jardin des Tuileries with my family, just outside the Louvre.   If you think of the statue as being ride-share giants Uber and Lyft, and if you think of the California state legislature as the pigeon, you’ll know why Uber and Lyft’s chief executives joined forces to write this opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.   As we explained here, California seems…

The state that brought us legalized recreational marijuana and local decriminalization of psychedelic mushrooms may be a bigger buzzkill than we thought — at least for businesses using independent contractors. A new Colorado law reclassifies the failure to pay wages as theft, which sounds pretty chill; but the way the law is written, it could have the effect of making independent contractor misclassification a crime. Failing to pay wages under Colorado law includes failing to…

This is a true story — and it was the most fun I ever had as a lawyer. I was representing the administrator of an estate. The deceased, Robert R, had required round-the-clock care before his demise, and his family retained several home heath care nurses. The family treated them as independent contractors. When one nurse was no longer needed, she filed for unemployment. The state agency decided she was an employee, not a contractor.…

California is the home of both the highest and the lowest points in the continental U.S. — Mt. Whitney at 14,495 feet and Death Valley at -282 feet. As far apart as these two sites are on the altimeter, they’re less than 100 miles apart on the odometer. That’s a lot of up and down. If you follow California’s developing law on Independent Contractor vs. Employee tests, you’ve also seen a lot of ups and…

Everyone loves a fun funeral story, right? Apparently so. AARP.com posted this article about creative cremations. Available options for ashes include: Being blasted out of a cannon to the tune of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” (Thank you, Hunter S. Thompson); Being placed in an “environmentally safe, ball-shaped concrete memorial reef” and placed in the ocean to create a marine habitat, (giving a new and more literal meaning to “sleeps with the fishes”); Being launched into space…