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Twitter, everyone’s favorite 140-character social media platform, has been struggling lately, struggling to keep up growth, struggling to make a profit, struggling to find a buyer. So, even as Twitter finally released some good news last week, reporting a strong Q3 performance, it was also reported that the company would be laying off about 9 percent of its workforce, with its sales team hit hardest. Now, lawyers are reaching out to those ex-Twitter employees, looking to see if they had an actionable claim against their former employer....

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, has its merits, and the most important one may be the great debate that has stirred up at water coolers around the country. For every woman who wants to lean in, there’s one that wants to lean out, and thus the latest iteration of the mommy wars continues. Earlier this week, The New York Times published an article about Sara Uttech, a woman, mother, and employee, who is not so much concerned with “leaning in,” as trying to have a good balance in her life....

Another year, another bunch of huge fines for car makers. It’s an inauspicious beginning for Honda, which just agreed to a $70 million settlement with the Department of Transportation over its failure to report deaths, injuries, and warranty claims to the federal government. What did Honda do to draw the government’s ire? Between 2003 and 2014, Honda failed to report 1,729 death and injury claims to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), according to a NHTSA press release....

Achieving true diversity in the workplace can be a tricky matter. Our jurisprudence on affirmative action is hanging in the balance of obscurity, yet we still have a way to go in attaining proportional representation of minorities in employment. What’s an in-house counsel to do about a company’s diversity policy? To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech during the March to Washington, here are five ways to legally promote diversity at your workplace and keep MLK’s dream alive:...

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has signed the state’s new “right-to-work” bills, making Michigan the 24th state with right-to-work laws on the books. Supporters say the laws encourage business investments and give workers more freedom. Opponents say the laws will reduce union membership and could potentially cripple organized labor since unions may lose funds if employees opt out. But love it or hate it, if your client has employees in a so-called “right-to-work state,” it’s important to know how to deal with them....

Lawyers love to get worked up about obscure grammar and style rules, almost as much as they like to get in a huff over obscure laws. (Emoluments, anyone?) There’s the long-running fight pitting case law aficionados against the caselaw’ers. A recent First Circuit ruling that was decided on the lack of an Oxford comma opened up a new front in that ongoing war. But frankly, that stuff is old news....

In a head-scratching move, two former executives at insurance brokerage firm Marsh & McLennan have filed a lawsuit against Eliot Spitzer, accusing the politician-turned-commentator of making defamatory statements in a piece written for Slate.com last year. Asking for $90 million, the pair, William Gilman and Edward McNenney, allege in the Spitzer defamation suit that the statements were made with actual malice, and though they are not mentioned in the piece, they are its “readily identifiable” subjects....

Adios, fried and well-done foods. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took the long-awaited step of announcing a 60 day notice-and-comment period for regulations that will ban artificial trans fats from the nation’s food supply. This week, while abstaining from rulemaking, they warn us that fried and burnt grains and potatoes will cause cancer due to a newly-discovered chemical that forms at high temperatures. No more French fries? Pass the boiled and steamed veggies....

I’ll be the first to admit - I’m a bit late to the Google+ bandwagon. I signed up six months after everyone else. When I got there a couple years ago, it was a post-hype empty room. And though Google claims to now have over four hundred million users, at least a quarter of which are active each month, GigaOm points out that the number is likely a bit inflated....

In a prosecution for conspiracy to commit money laundering, district court’s denial of defendant’s motion for acquittal, on the ground that the evidence was insufficient to establish that he possessed the mens rea required for the crime, is affirmed where a rational jury could find: 1) that defendant knew that the money he transferred derived from unlawful activity; 2) beyond a reasonable doubt, that defendant knew that the money came from some form of unlawful activity; 3) that the defendant engaged in conduct that was commonly known to conceal the nature, location, source, ownership, or control of the proceeds....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. Since the beginning of time, unfortunately, some people have been intent on causing harm to others for their own benefit. This, of course, has been true with respect to Internet conduct. Indeed, we now live in a world in which the “black hats” are actively hacking and causing other problems in cyberspace, while the “white hats” are trying to combat these efforts....

Hare today, gone tomorrow. Sorry, late Easter Bunny joke. It should been: “Hair today, gone tomorrow.” That’s because we’re going to talk about job applicants and their hair. The issue is, should employers hire or fire based on haircuts? Hair Today Of all fashion statements, hair may say it most personally. It’s not like person can just take it on and off. Off maybe; on, not really. Anyway, hair is literally part of a person and can be singled out as a basis for discrimination....

Adios now-former Chief Judge Joel Dubina. Judge Rosemary Barkett, we’ll miss you as well, especially your passionate anti-Death Penalty dissents. With those two judges on their way out, and two vacancies in place, what will the active bench look like? If President Obama can fill the vacant seats before the end of his term, it will take an already left-leaning court and lock those leanings into place for probably the next few decades....

For a long time, the track to success for lawyers was to get into a BigLaw firm and make one’s way to partnership. Fortunately, attitudes about this have changed recently. Still, it would go too far to say that lots of lawyers are falling over themselves to work in smaller firms because of perceived drop in prestige. But dogged refusal to work in a smaller firm forecloses a lot of real value to the practicing attorney....

After contentious debate, the delegates to the ABA’s midyear meeting adopted a modest proposal to give states a framework for considering regulation of “nontraditional legal service providers.” The resolution does not endorse nonlawyer legal services, nor does it call for the repeal of laws against practicing a law without a license. But it is radical in that it acknowledges that some states may consider allowing nonlawyers to perform certain legal tasks and creates guiding principles to help them get there....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. Perhaps by now you have seen the recent movie, Ex Machina. If you have not, suffice it to say, an Internet coder is drawn into an unusual experiment in which he engages with a true artificial intelligence (AI) being delivered in the form of an attractive female robot. Is this the stuff of science fiction, or is it possible that humans may transform themselves fundamentally based on human design?...

Lawyers may have grown accustomed to ignoring Bryan Garner and all his nitpicky wisdom about language and the law. But in his recent ABA Journal piece on modern language usage, Garner dropped a bombshell nugget of wisdom that’s just too true to ignore: Using language correctly improves your credibility. And while Garner has a point about tying language use (or misuse) to credibility, he also provides a test and some context to understand just what this all means....

Judge David Hamilton of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has a rather simple and helpful tip for litigators filing administrative motions: Talk to your adversary before filing the motion. As Judge Hamilton explains in a recent order granting a motion for two pending appeals to be consolidated along with an amended briefing schedule, the moving party could have saved time for both the court and the parties by simply making a call and advising the court of an adversary’s non-opposition or consent/agreement to the motion....

A new study finds that 28 percent of law firms are going paperless, or plan to do so within five years. So that leaves 72 percent of firms with apparently no plan to go paperless. Would these firms be in violation of their professional ethics by not exploring the paperless option? Surprisingly, the answer may be “yes.” Over the summer, the American Bar Association approved a new commentary to their rules that would make it a professional obligation for lawyers and firms to keep up with technology trends, writes ScanSnap....

There aren’t many silver linings to finding yourself on the receiving end of a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) lawsuit, but the Supreme Court identified one on Monday. If a debtor sues for a FDCPA violation and loses, the debtor can be assigned attorney’s fees and costs. The case, Marx v. General Revenue Corporation, could discourage debtors from pursuing FDCPA claims. After appellant Olivea Marx defaulted on her student loan, General Revenue Corporation (GRC) tried to collect on the account....