The #MeToo movement has made us more aware of pervasive sexual harassment, but harassment based on every protected characteristic—including race, religion, age, and national origin—is pervasive and persistent. Former EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, now a director of workplace culture consulting at Morgan Lewis, says companies must take a more proactive approach to tackling cultural problems that lead to harassment and sap productivity. She explains that, for many years, employers thought...

Cannabis is illegal under current federal law. But with attitudes—and state laws—changing, we could see federal legalization very soon. If that does happen, regulations will dictate how growers, makers, dispensers, and consumers comply with the resulting framework. What would those regulations look like? In this episode, Joanne Caceres, a senior managing associate at Dentons, explains that the federal government's current regulation of hemp already gives us a lot of information about the...

Artificial intelligence tools are now thoroughly embedded in the practice of law. Lawyers are using these tools to search, sort, predict, and guide many traditional legal tasks. But there are complex concerns at work: lawyers need to keep on top of new technologies, protect client confidentiality, comply with ethical constraints, and at the end of the day, be confident in what the computer spits out. In this episode, law professor and legal tech expert Dan Linna argues that lawyers should...

Biotech firms have trouble getting reliable access to capital throughout the long, unpredictable development, testing, and approval process. While it’s in some ways a typical high risk, potentially high reward business, biotech can provide life-saving innovations when the success finally materializes.   J.W. Verret, GMU law school professor and member of the SEC’s investor advisory committee, has ideas to help biotech and other small-cap companies access the public and exempt markets more...

A simple complaint against Facebook’s privacy practices, submitted to an Irish agency by an Austrian law student, has snowballed into a seven-year legal battle that continues to disrupt the global privacy landscape. The European Union’s highest court will soon issue a ruling that Bloomberg Law analyst Mark Smith says may have major implications for U.S. lawyers and businesses.   In this episode, Smith details the legal carve-outs Facebook has relied upon to justify the transfer of data from...

The #MeToo movement is changing how M&A deals are written. Statements designed to protect deal parties from liability for C-suite sexual harassment are showing up in mergers and acquisitions of every size and across many sectors of the market. This type of statement is known as a “#MeToo rep” or “Weinstein clause” and, according to Bloomberg Law legal analyst Grace Burnett, it is a “provision going viral.” In this episode, Burnett discusses the emergence of #MeToo Reps (short for...

Office housework might make an office run more efficiently, but it can hold back an employee’s career and lead to expensive lawsuits for employers. Dori Goldstein, employment law Legal Analyst, and Cindy-Ann Thomas, principal at Littler Mendelson, explain the problems with tasks like planning the office holiday party or scheduling a meeting, and why so many of those tasks fall to women. They discuss the changing legal risks surrounding office housework, and explain how to prevent it from...

Erich Spangenberg, CEO and co-founder of IPWe, is trying to give a technology-driven makeover to the $200 billion patent licensing and acquisition market. Spangenberg talks with Dori Goldstein and Meg McEvoy about leaving behind his patent troll past to create IPWe, a platform that connects transacting parties and provides AI-driven analytics on patent transactions. IPWe is aiming to bring in data from the world’s approximately 200 patent offices and create transparency around the pricing of...

In this third and final episode in a series on cryptocurrency, New York Department of Financial Services Superintendent Linda Lacewell discusses BitLicenses, which enable virtual currency projects, including those that touch the state’s mammoth banking sector. Initially unpopular among the Fintech and crypto communities, BitLicenses are lending legitimacy to virtual currency projects. 2019 was the busiest year yet, with eight crypto projects getting licensed by NYDFS. Lacewell discusses how...

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, also known as “crypto-mom,” has strong views on how her agency can facilitate the growth of cryptocurrencies. The sole dissenting commissioner in the SEC’s denial of the Winkelvoss Bitcoin Exchange Traded product, Peirce thinks the agency needs to provide more guidance to the crypto-sphere. Peirce discusses potential adjustments to the SEC regulatory framework for crypto to allow projects to get up and running and let the market realize its potential. In 2020,...

Digital currencies have the potential to transform the financial industry, with wide-ranging implications for regulators and attorneys. This three-part series on cryptocurrency demystifies a rapidly changing field, the regulatory response, and what it all means for law practices.  In this episode, Bloomberg Law senior data analytics manager Tom Shen and senior legal analyst Robert Kim explain the mechanics of cryptocurrencies and how they intersect with regulators and traditional banking....

Businesses are increasingly turning to litigation finance to fund commercial lawsuits. The practice transfers risk to third parties and moves high legal fees off a company’s balance sheet. Charles Agee, founder and managing partner of Westfleet Advisors, discusses the maturing litigation finance industry. Agee estimates that more than half of Am Law 200 firms have had clients use commercial litigation finance. Standards are emerging across litigation finance contracts, according to Agee. For...

DOJ recently announced it is stepping up enforcement of FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), breathing new life into this World War II-era law. FARA requires “agents” of a foreign principal to register – but Joe Moreno, former federal prosecutor and partner at Cadwalader, thinks the law is vague and is being applied too broadly. In one of the cases to come out of the Mueller investigation, former Skadden partner Greg Craig was acquitted of FARA charges over his representation of the...

Why should a lawyer who doesn’t represent health care or insurance companies be concerned about HIPAA? One of the largest health care data breaches, which compromised nearly 25 million individuals’ records, didn’t occur at a hospital or clinic – it was the result of a billing/collection company breach.   Betsy Mountenay, analysis manager at Bloomberg Law who focuses on health care, interviews Iliana L. Peters, a shareholder and health law attorney at Polsinelli in Washington, DC. Peters is...

John E. Smith, former director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and co-head of Morrison Foerster’s national security practice, discusses the current Iran sanctions and their impact on global business. Since the U.S. withdrew unilaterally from the Iran nuclear deal, it has become an outlier, as much of the rest of the world, including Europe, wants to continue to do business with Iran.   Smith discusses the risk of sanctions fatigue as economic penalties...

Orrick has been named the Most Innovative North American Law Firm by Financial Times for the past three years. Three members of Orrick’s innovation team, Wendy Butler Curtis, Chief Innovation Officer, Kate Orr, Senior Innovation Counsel, and Daryl Shetterly, Director of Orrick Analytics, discuss how the firm has engineered and maintained an innovative culture. The innovation team discusses concrete steps firms can take to optimize processes and get innovation into the DNA of an organization. ...

Google and its subsidiary, YouTube, recently entered into a record $170 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General over allegations that YouTube unlawfully collected children’s personal information.  It is the largest settlement ever under COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which prevents companies from using child-directed online services to collect data on children under 13 without parental consent. Kristin Cohen, Assistant...

Maria T. Vullo, former superintendent of New York’s banking and insurance regulator, the New York Department of Financial Services, was responsible for drafting and implementing the state’s groundbreaking cybersecurity compliance regulation. The rule requires financial institutions to have cybersecurity compliance programs in place – with far-reaching implications for banks and institutions around the world. Vullo weighs in on current federal efforts to strengthen Gramm-Leach-Bliley and has...

The former president and founder of Institutional Shareholder Services, now one of the world’s largest investment advisory firms, discusses how companies like Wal-Mart can have a bigger impact on the environment than governments can. Minow, “corporate critic” and shareholder advocate, also highlights how executive compensation packages can be a harbinger for company performance and why Facebook’s corporate leadership structure is concerning. Minow also shares advice for corporate in-house...

From the legal analyst team at Bloomberg Law, a new podcast exploring today’s challenging legal landscape. For more information: https://pro.bloomberglaw.com/law-xo-podcast/