Expert HR Systems: A Guide for Counsel

I am pleased to announce that my paper, tentatively titled “Countering Bias in Expert HR Systems: A Guide for In-House Counsel,” has been accepted for publication in the International In-house Counsel Journal.   

The paper will present a very user-friendly guide to understanding and managing the risk from expert HR systems.  As I’ve argued in this blog, management-side employment counsel must get deep under the hood of expert systems designed to perform evaluative functions on candidates and employees.  From procurement to deployment, counsel must be equipped to understand the bias that will likely (unintentionally) creep into algorithmic decision-making and to manage the risk of such bias.

Paying Employees in Bitcoin?

Employers in the US likely cannot pay their employees in virtual currencies (VC) such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.  For employers who are still interested (or not fully persuaded by my line of reasoning), I offer some liability minimizing strategies, below.

(Post updated 4/3/2017)

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The EU GDPR for US Employers: Practice Tips

The new EU GDPR will be a game changer for a number of multinational employers.  Here are a few practice pointers for US-based enterprises with European HR data:

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The New Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA): An Employer’s Guide

The new Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA)  is designed to create a federal standard for trade secret protection – and includes remedies that permit federal judicial seizure of stolen trade secrets.  DTSA fills an important gap in the statutory framework that employers have available to them to retrieve trade secrets stolen by departing employees, such as the  CFAA (.pdf), the Economic Espionage Act and the patchwork of state trade secret laws (.pdf).

Here is what employment lawyers need to know and do now:

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“Live Blog”: Data Breach War Room / Breach Preparation

As mentioned, I am a panelist at today’s “Data Breach War Room / Breach Preparation” at iTechLaw’s 2016 World Technology Conference in Miami.  I will be “live blogging” the key lessons from today’s workshop.  My co-panelists, Meg Strickler, Jon Neiditz and Mark Mermelstein, will have the chance to review this content, but until they do, I am solely responsible for its content.   Here goes:

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Holacracy, Zappos and Employment Law (LMFTFY)

Holacracy is a non-hierarchical management philosophy that is getting a lot of attention these days.  As readers might know, Zappos recently adopted this ideology, famously eliminating bosses and job titles.  Although not strictly a technology, it has been called a social technology; more relevantly for this blog, it is a model used by a number of technologically-fueled enterprises.

Editor’s note 6/22: see also Kate Bischoff‘s excellent piece from 6/5/15: The Law Isn’t Trendy.

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Gamification and Employment Law Compliance

Gamification is the now-hot idea of importing game design techniques into any arena requiring human motivation, including the workplace.  There are a number of compliance points around gamification with which employment lawyers ought to be concerned.  My overall perspective is that these are manageable risks — and that gamification can be successfully deployed in the workplace.

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FTC: Employment Law #Gamechanger?

The Federal Trade Commission is deeply involved in the intersection of emerging technology and the employer-employee relationship.  Two such areas merit a closer look: social media endorsements and cybersecurity.  (I have previously written about the FTC on the subjects of big data and IoT in the workplace).

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Procuring IoT: Data Integrity and Security

The Internet of Things (IoT) is undoubtedly going to play a major role in the workplace.  Because an employer has a number of critical employee-related interests in securing IoT data, including protecting securing otherwise private employee and business information as well as protecting trade secrets, employment lawyers should be in the conversation with the technology acquisition and development teams as they develop an IoT acquisition policy.  Here is how to create such a policy.

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