The CBS Board of Directors hired a top-notch team of women lawyers to investigate misconduct by ex-chairman and CEO Les Moonves—but don't necessarily expect to see any of their work.

In an SEC filing on Monday, the company said it will “seek to preserve the confidentiality of all written and oral reports by the investigators” and “not to make public such Investigator Information to the maximum extent possible consistent with fiduciary duties of directors and all applicable laws.”

In some ways, it doesn't really matter. Ronan Farrow writing for The New Yorker already detailed allegations of harassment and sexual assault by Moonves. Do we really want to know more about him forcibly kissing and groping women, and how he “got on top of her and held her down and she couldn't get away”?

Jenna GreeneBut a report by Debevoise & Plimpton's Mary Jo White—a former SEC chair and U.S. attorney—and Covington & Burling's Nancy Kestenbaum—co-chair of her firm's white-collar defense and investigations practice group—could provide the definitive account. It's not just about what Moonves did, but also how CBS responded. The decision by the network to try to keep the report under wraps is regrettable and feels like a missed opportunity for accountability and reform.

After all, other entities grappling with sexual misconduct allegations have shared the findings of their independent investigators. For example, Kestenbaum's 48-page report to Choate Rosemary Hall's Board of Trustees is public—with the title-page caveat, “The content of this report is sensitive, personal, and graphic. It is not intended for children. Reader discretion is advised.”

Speaking on the PBS News Hour on Monday, Farrow said CBS employees have been reluctant to speak to the teams from Covington and Debevoise.

“There are significant questions from these sources in the stories about the impartial nature of the investigation,” he said. “As long as the board was in place, as it was a few days ago, with a majority of its members very much predisposed to be in favor of Mr. Moonves, people within the company said, we are not prepared to speak to these investigators in a lot of cases, because they felt that there was no universe in which there would be an outcome that actually held anyone to account, and they feared that they might be retaliated against for speaking.”

But CBS news correspondent Paula Reid, who is a lawyer and covers the Justice Department, White House and legal affairs, went to bat for Covington and Debevoise in a tweet on Tuesday.

“I reached out to @CovingtonLLP earlier this month & met with them (along w/ @Debevoise) for 2hrs on Friday. The attorneys I met with (all women) were professional, compassionate, & thorough. I encourage others at @CBSNews to speak w/them.”

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Feeling Google-y

My colleague Erin Mulvaney has an interesting look at the age bias suit against Google, which is pending in federal court in San Jose.

In 2016, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman conditionally certified the class—a move which Google this week asked the court to reconsider.

A big focus of the litigation is how Google interviews and hires employees, and whether the process is biased against older applicants.

“The purpose of Google's interviews is to 'understand how the candidate would perform at Google,' ” Google counsel Brian Berry of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart wrote. Google says that its interviews focus mostly on cognitive ability and role-related knowledge.

But what I really want to know is—just what exactly does Google ask job applicants? Relevant-seeming chunks of the complaint have been redacted, but the company was once notorious for its off-the-wall interview questions.

Among them: “Why are manhole covers round?” and “A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?” and “How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?” and “How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?”

Apparently, the questions these days are a bit more normal, though there are still some that would leave me stumped. Some reported examples: “Which do you think has more advertising potential in Boston, a flower shop or funeral home?” “Estimate the number of tennis balls that can fit into a plane” “Name a prank you would pull on manager if you were hired” and “What does being Google-y mean to you.”

The plaintiffs, who interviewed at Google between 2007 and 2014, complain that “interviewers emphasize abstract, theoretical questions of the sort currently taught and tested in college and graduate school computer science programs. This is done despite the fact that questions of this sort have very little (if any) relation to real-world software design and related IT work. This practice places younger candidates (i.e., recent graduates) at an advantage compared with older candidates (who have generally been out of school for longer).”

Which I read as, the longer it's been since you got high in a dorm room, the lower your chances of expounding passionately on, say, “If you could only choose one song to play every time you walked into a room for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

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Shout-Out: Simpson Thacher Shuts Down Securities Suit

A team from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett won dismissal of a securities fraud suit against IRSA Inversiones y Representaciones Sociedad Anónima and Cresud Sociedad Anónima Comercial, Inmobiliaria, Financiera y Agropecuaria. (How's that for a mouthful?)

IRSA is an Argentine real estate company. Cresud is an Argentine company that owns prime agricultural land in Argentina. The complaint details a wildly complex series of transactions, but the key allegations are that the defendants failed to disclose that they controlled another company, or to incorporate that company's financial results into its own.

U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick in the Southern District of New York concluded that the plaintiffs, who were represented by The Rosen Law Firm, did not adequately plead a material misstatement or omission. He also did not find the requisite scienter.

“Plaintiff fails to provide any basis for a conclusion that defendants had a motive to defraud, and its allegations of conscious misbehavior or recklessness are virtually nonexistent,” he wrote.

The Simpson team was led by litigation partners Bryce Friedman and George Wang. The defendants were also represented by Ballard Spahr.

Securities lawsuits filed over either cryptocurrencies or bitcoin have tripled so far this year amidst a SEC crackdown.

“Each day that Uber misclassifies its primary workforce, it steals wages from drivers earning below a living wage and gains millions of dollars in unlawful cost savings,” a suit by lawyers at Robins Kaplan and Keller Lenkner states.

Companies are paying significant sums to settle cases that could be won at trial, or at least could result in a verdict for less than what it would cost to settle.

A conservative nonprofit organization must hand over the names of its top contributors to the California attorney general.

Bill Cosby wants the judge overseeing his case to recuse because of an alleged personal conflict dating back almost 20 years.

Each of the parties has taken on significant litigation risk. Whether or not they have been wise remains to be seen.

In Case You Missed It

I dearly wish ALM could have an awards dinner for them all. It would be like “Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure,” but with lawyers.