Welcome back to Inside Track! Forty percent of GCs and in-house attorneys believe they will need to dedicate more resources to handling how they deal with employee use of cannabis as the market continues to grow, according to a white paper published by Shook, Hardy & Bacon last week.

“There is a developing body of case law and an evolving spectrum of statutes regarding off-duty use of marijuana and CBD,” Michael Barnett, a partner at Shook, Hardy & Bacon in Kansas City, Missouri, said.

Barnett said while some states have made recreational use of marijuana legal, those states have also indicated that an employee can be fired for violating a drug policy.

Barnett also said there is a growing trend of employees acknowledging they violated a work drug policy, but thought they were ingesting something other than THC.

“[The employee] believed they only ingested CBD and shouldn’t be in violation of their employer’s drug policy,” Barnett explained.

Barnett said that has been on the minds of in-house counsel because once marijuana is legalized in a state, it isn’t long until employees begin asking if they can use marijuana or CBD outside of work.

Does your company have a policy against off-duty use of marijuana or CBD even if it is legal in your state? Let me know by emailing me at [email protected].

What’s Happening

 

Filing Employment Data

GCs on Monday began working to make sure their U.S. employers file employee pay data with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by Sept. 30, according to a report by Law.com reporter Sue Reisinger. Before the EEOC only required employers with over 100 employees to submit the ethnicity and gender of all employees. Now those employers must also submit pay data.

Brett Coburn, a partner at Alston & Bird, said legal departments will be impacted because they’re going to need to figure out how to pull together all of the data to file the form. GCs will also need to consider how that data is going to be used by the federal government. Coburn said the U.S. Office of Federal Contract Compliance has previously said it plans on considering the pay data when it is determining who should be up for compliance review.

There are also public relations risks involved for companies. Coburn said the data is not supposed to be made public. However that pay data could be accessed through Freedom of Information Act requests.

“So it would be wise to look at this data, and how it could be used or spun, through a public relations lens,” Coburn said.

 

The Client’s Responsibility

High rates of depression, addiction and suicide at law firms have been publicly documented and studied for years. Law.com reporter Caroline Spiezio found that in-house counsel have not evaluated their role in how they impact the mental health of their firm attorneys.

Clients expecting around-the-clock work and immediate results is often what leads firm attorneys to depression. Jim Patton, the former president of the ACC’s Kentucky and South Florida chapters, said that mindset among clients lacks empathy and is bad for business.

Bree Buchanan, a senior adviser at the legal industry mental health group Krill Strategies, said in-house departments often run outside counsel into the ground and do not get the quality of work that they want because of it. Domenic Cervoni, vice president in the legal department at HSBC, said he makes clear with his firms what work is and is not urgent.

This approach, Patrick Krill, founder of Krill Strategies, said that approach will help firm attorneys and deliver better results.

“We have to change the entire ecosystem and the entire culture and that does involve all stakeholders coming to the table and saying, ‘What can we do to do our part?’” Krill said. “Part of that is in-house counsel, and I think they need to be brought into this conversation.”

What I’ve Been Reading

The NCAA’s legal spending has jumped up by $18 million over the past two years because of a series of high-profile lawsuits, according to a report in Inside Higher Ed. Facing concussion and antitrust lawsuits, the athletic organization is slated to spend $54 million for the 2019 fiscal year.

Britain’s law firms need to find new ways to bill in-house legal departments, according to an article in Lawyer Monthly. Nicholas d’Adhemar, founder and CEO at Apperio, wrote in the publication that errors in billing are widespread and not often caught or addressed. D’Adhemar said the answer to this problem is in the use of newer technology and having in-house teams integrate with law firm practice management systems. He said this will allow for greater transparency.

The associate general counsel of Amazon, Nate Sutton, got into a heated exchange with lawmakers over the company’s third-party sellers according to a report in Bloomberg. Democratic congressman David Cicilline asked whether it was proper to own products on a platform it controls while competing with other sellers. Sutton said retail stores often do this. However, Cicilline argued Amazon has the advantage of having its customers’ data and can manipulate algorithms on its platform.

Don’t Miss

Tuesday, July 23 – The Federalist Society will hold an event on The Role of the Corporate General Counsel at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich, Connecticut. Speakers will include Mark Nielsen, general counsel of Frontier Communications; Kevin O’Connor, chief legal officer of Point72 Asset Management; and Kathleen O’Connor, vice president for legal and external affairs at AQR Capital Management, will be speaking.

Tuesday July 23 – Thursday, July 25 – The Association of Corporate Counsel will be hosting its 2019 ACC Securities Law + Disclosure event at The Gwen Hotel in Chicago. Topics will include The Securities Act of 1933, Understanding Financial Statements through Color Accounting, and The General Counsel and The Board of Directors.

Thursday, July 25 – Friday, July 26 – The American Conference Institute will be hosting a panel of Women Leaders in Life Sciences Law at the Omni Parker House in Boston. Speakers will include Donna M. Meuth, associate general counsel at Eisai Inc.; Tamara Joseph, general counsel at Enzyvant; and Elona Kogan, general counsel and corporate secretary at Selecta Biosciences.

On The Move

 

✦ FLIR Systems ✦ Sonia Galindo, the former general counsel for Rosetta Stone Inc., has become the top lawyer and chief ethics and compliance officer for the industrial and defense technology company. She succeeds Todd DuChene, who resigned in March to work at Core Scientific Inc.

✦ The Estée Lauder Companies ✦ Sara Moss, who previously served as the company’s general counsel, has been promoted to vice chairman. She will continue her role as the company’s general counsel until a successor is appointed. The company said in a statement that the position was specifically designed for Moss.

✦ Wedbush Securities ✦ Andrew Druch was named the first general counsel of the Los Angeles-based firm on Tuesday. He previously served as general counsel for the Americas for DNB, Norway’s largest financial services group. Druch was hired a month after Wedbush paid more than $8.1 million to settle charges of allegedly mishandling pre-released American Depository Receipts.