Most companies engage professional recruiters or “headhunters” out of sheer necessity, particularly in highly competitive markets where talented candidates are scarce. Recruiters are able to approach prospects freely, and often, their networks are more robust than those of an internal hiring manager. Notwithstanding such advantages, working with a headhunter can be expensive. To protect this investment, companies should carefully review and negotiate the provisions of their recruitment agreement, which, in most cases, should include the following nine “must-have” clauses:

On March 12, 2021, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill (A3354B) mandating that employers provide their employees with paid time off to be vaccinated for COVID-19. Specifically, employees shall receive “a sufficient period of time, not to exceed four hours” per vaccine dose, and be paid at their regular rate of pay for the entire leave period. For employees receiving the 2-dose Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, they will be eligible for up to eight hours of paid leave.

Commercial transactions often involve the disclosure of proprietary and confidential information by one or both parties to an agreement. To preserve the value of such information, the disclosing party typically expects the receiving party to sign a non-disclosure (NDA) or confidentiality agreement. Although NDAs can vary considerably, when both parties to an agreement wish to protect proprietary information, a mutual NDA will be negotiated.

Time rounding is common practice used by employers of hourly employees to simplify their payroll calculations. Although this practice is legal, federal and state guidelines do exist on how to fairly round “hours worked” by employees. Recently, the California Supreme Court offered additional parameters on the use of time rounding, holding that such practices are not permissible in the context of providing non-exempt (hourly) employees their 30-minute unpaid meal periods.

Virtually all contracts have payment-related provisions which can span a wide variety of ancillary issues, including invoicing, disputes over invoiced amounts, timing of payments, and remedies for late payments. When reviewing these provisions, your position will, naturally, depend on your role in the agreement: are you the vendor collecting payment or the customer making payment? In some situations, such as in co-marketing deals, payments will be flowing in both directions.

As we reported last year, the invalidation of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield on July 16, 2020 is forcing the hand of U.S. companies which access the personal data of EU residents to find a new, lawful mechanism by which to do so in accordance with EU data protection laws. One such alternative – the use of the EU’s standard contractual clauses (SCCs) (a/k/a “Model Clauses”) – was recently bolstered by much-needed proposed updates to the clauses themselves.

In this new era of remote working, employers may think that the risk of sexual harassment is no longer a major concern, and therefore, prevention training should not be a high priority. Unfortunately, this reasoning relies on misconceptions about harassment and can lead to serious problems for an employer, including challenging employee relations issues, disruption of business operations, embarrassing news coverage that can damage an organization’s brand and bottom line, and costly litigation and liability under federal and state anti-harassment laws.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently issued guidance to employers in the form of best practice recommendations for protecting employees from COVID-19. Intended only for workplaces outside the healthcare industry, OSHA’s “Protecting Workers: Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID-19 in the Workplace” focuses on the creation of a COVID-19 prevention program which prioritizes employee involvement, communication and training.