Category Archives: Labor Law

Imagine you are a highly skilled individual with a strong technical background and land a job as the Chief Technology Officer for a large Company in a specialized industry.  The Company offers a great benefit package detailed in the company’s employee manual.  After several years of hard work your Company is taken over, either by merger or acquisition, and the New Company terminates your position. Upon your departure, new management may ask you to sign a Separation Agreement as a condition to receiving your severance package.  In this Separation Agreement, new management asks you to release any and all claims, whether known or unknown, you may have against your former employer and the new acquiring company. The Separation Agreement may also require you to acknowledge that you were in possession of the Company’s trade secrets and confidential information and that you agree not to use these trade secrets in competition…
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As a Los Angeles based business litigation attorney representing small to medium sized companies, I often need to address lawsuits brought by former employees.  In these lawsuits the fired employee usually claims they were unfairly fired because they did nothing wrong or their boss had it out for them. The issue is often whether the company was required to provide them some sort of hearing or whether the firing was based upon some form of discrimination and merely a pretext. In California there is something called at-will employment.  Labor Code section 2922 provides, in pertinent part: “An employment, having no specified term, may be terminated at the will of either party on notice to the other.” This statute creates a presumption of at-will employment which may be overcome ‘by evidence that despite the absence of a specified term, the parties agreed that the employer’s power to terminate would be limited…
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In this economic environment we are seeing a lot of bid protests on public works construction projects.  Public contracts requires the public entity to assure construction contract awards are subject to fair competive bidding. The goal of competitive bidding in public contracting is to guard against favoritism, improvidence, extravagance, fraud, and corruption; to prevent waste of public funds; and to obtain the best economic result for the public. Bid protests arise when an unsuccessful bidder challenges a contract award to another bidder.  The challenge could be the party awarded the contract gained an advantage over other bidders because the winning bidder did not provide a bid that conformed to the contract specifications. Another ground for a bid protest is the awarding body did not award the contract to the lowest responsible bidder. Courts have held that a lowest responsible bidder who has been denied a contract has no right to…
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