In a world where technology has made it easier than ever to overapply, Fisher explains what companies are doing to find qualified candidates, and what job seekers should be aware of before they submit their applications. Specificity, Fisher says, is the best way to get your resume in front of human eyes and find the position that works for you.

“Focus is one of the most important things. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Don't try to be a Jack or Jill of all trades. Don't apply to anything and everything. Focus very specifically on the thing that you would most likely get hired to do and get paid well to do.”

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A company can’t predict or control problems created by workplace activism. But it can control its preparation for handling it. “If you don’t have a rapid response team set up as a company, you’re probably not doing your job, in my estimation,” he says. “You need to have a cross-company team ready to go when a crisis emerges. That would not only include general management executives, but also lawyers, comms people (and) technology people.” 

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Today, we’re going to talk about religious accommodation in the Dobbs era. Our guest is Ann McGinley. She’s a recently retired law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law, where she also served as the co-director of the Workplace Law Program. She sees rising controversy due to growing interest in religious accommodation, particularly as it relates to job duties.

As she wrote in a recent piece and expands on here: “The stakes are high. Employers have no choice but to try to ameliorate the conflicts at work arising from this powder keg, and religious accommodation requests are often central to either creating a conflagration or dousing the fire.”

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In this episode, we talk about myriad employment law issues the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) is facing, from the rise of name, image and likeness deals to the unionization of Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team, to arguments about who, exactly, the athletes work for if they are, in fact, employees.

Collectively, all of this portends seismic changes in the NCAA in the employment law space. “It’s clear that this ball’s been rolling downhill a long time,” Drew says. “It took a while. It took a long while, and for most of our lifetimes, the NCAA had a stranglehold on what was previously known as a student athlete.”

But that term could become a relic of the past. “The prospects for the NCAA do not look good. There’s at least one case out there that may very well sound the death knell for the NCAA in terms of just massive amounts of liability,” Drew says.

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Today we talk about the future of noncompete agreements. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted to ban them in April 2024, but are they really dead? That’s the question everyone is asking, and we put it to Stewart Schwab, a former Cornell Law School Dean who, in his 40 years as a professor, has taught and spoken on this topic frequently.

Schwab believes the Supreme Court will ultimately rule that the FTC overstepped its bounds in banning noncompetes. In the meantime, he advises companies to rethink how they use noncompete agreements.

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Our host is internationally recognized journalist, author and NPR host Celeste Headlee. Today we talk about making career transitions that are right for you, with guest Erica Buell.

Buell is a Founder and Startup Legal Advisor at Buell Law, PLLC and a former professor and director of the Law and Entrepreneurship program at Duke University. Over the course of her very varied career, Erica has worked in big law, as an in-house attorney, a tech startup consultant and a stay at home parent. We talk about how to use your instincts to find a job and a team that provide you purpose and fulfillment without burning out.

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Sutton walks us through a list of dos and don’ts for effectively managing leave rules and regulations. Perhaps even more important than strictly following guidelines, is a commitment to treating employees fairly — that covers a multitude of mistakes, she says. Sutton encourages companies to create “a feeling like there’s dignity in the workplace.” 

“And that’s the golden rule. In all of these different potential landmines that employers can trigger, whether it’s getting the leaves right, going through all the steps of an accommodation or something else, I think that as long as the employee can see that the employer is doing their best and trying to comply, that employer ends up in a much stronger position.”

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we are featuring a discussion with Kate Nearpass about how to keep workplace investigations neutral. 

Nearpass, a veteran investigator who recently started her own firm, says neutrality is crucial to building trust into the system and can help avoid further escalation of claims, including litigation.

“Employers who want to have a process like this, who have gone through the not-insignificant hurdle of putting together an office or a team of people who will take these complaints in and look at them, really do want to see the workplace improved,” she says.

“They want their workplaces to be safe and fair. And they want their employees to trust the process. If there is any actual conduct on the part of the investigators that suggests that they are always going to come out in favor of the employer, for example, nobody’s going to trust the process.”

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This conversation with Mitchell was originally recorded for the AccelPro Audit community, however, it is relevant to those in the legal field as well. This bonus episode is free for everyone, a sample of what paid members get when they join the AccelPro community.

When it comes to reporting around ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), the ‘E’ often gets most of the attention as companies wrestle with new rules and guidelines around carbon emissions and other environmental impacts. But the landscape around the ‘S’ — which stands for social — is changing just as rapidly as employees, other stakeholders and even activists from both sides of the political spectrum start to take a greater interest in firms’ performance in areas like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and pay equity. 

Mitchell, an attorney who runs the Affirmative Action Practice Group at Jackson Stone, is an expert in the challenges companies are facing around reporting the ‘S’ in ESG. She talked to AccelPro Audit about the fast-changing landscape around reporting diversity data, the importance of being data driven, auditors’ role in collecting that data and how everyone in the space is confused (but talking to peers helps).

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He constructed his employment law career with the goal of becoming a mediator. In this interview, Strauss walks us through the steps, skills and abilities necessary to make the transition from lawyer to mediator. 

He says his years of experience as a litigator have been crucial in preparing him for his new role. “I wanted to have the credibility that comes from settling eight-figure cases, but also having to negotiate a walkaway for zero dollars because of something coming up that was wholly unexpected,” he says. “I wanted to be able to step in a room and explain, I’ve won these cases at trial, but I’ve also lost these cases at trial. I’ve won arguments at the court of appeal. I’ve lost arguments at the court of appeal. I’ve even had the court of appeal reversed by the United States Supreme Court in one of my cases.”

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Bonnie Levine, a partner at gunnercooke, about ways attorneys can help craft diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that are both legally informed and effective. 

“The baseline is that lawyers don’t have a lot of background in diversity, equity and inclusion. And not only that, but because so much of diversity, equity and inclusion involves a person’s lived experiences, people will tokenize someone based on their lived experience and conflate that with acquired knowledge. The easiest example is, this person is a woman, so they know all about structural gender discrimination,” she says.

“And that’s simply not accurate. I have a diagram I use in some of my presentations that has to do with lived experiences and acquired knowledge. There’s an overlap, but these are two separate categories of knowledge. And one reason why diversity, equity and inclusion gets so stuck in this legal paradigm is that lawyers don’t understand the expertise that the DEI practitioners have.”

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion about the union grievance arbitration process. Our guest is Corey Franklin, a member of FordHarrison’s Labor Relations and Healthcare Practice Groups and office managing partner of the firm’s St. Louis office. He’ll walk us through keys to success in the arbitration process and share hard lessons learned along the way.

“Where things tend to fall apart is where the employer is not fully apprised of their own facts. Every day, we all face a growing stack of paper and emails and things to do,” Franklin says. “So it’s understandable that folks tend to try to jump to the conclusion and cut out the investigation. But that’s really the first thing to do: Make sure you’ve got your arms around all the issues, all the facts, all the documents that are going to establish those facts.”

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The interview is part of our AccelPro Career Tools series, where we explore topics including client relationship management and wellness. Our host is internationally recognized journalist, author and NPR host Celeste Headlee. Today we’re featuring a conversation with recruiter Jonathan Birenbaum, Senior Director at Lateral Link.

Birenbaum is an experienced litigator who now specializes in the recruitment of partners, counsels and associates. He says that the right time to make a lateral move is when you are no longer feeling challenged and rewarded in your current firm, and that it’s worth possibly sacrificing certain work relationships to find a place with the right people, in a location you enjoy.

“You have to really understand where you sit in your firm. You have to do an analysis for yourself and ask yourself what the cost benefits are going to be if you leave. And if the cost is going to be not maintaining the relationships you had at the firm, that can be a major cost for you, but it depends on what kind of firm you're with.”

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“Businesses don’t know how to manage people anymore,” Grau says. “And on top of that, in the absence of political solutions, there’s just more pressure on companies to step up and lead in things like racial justice, support for caregivers, mental health and wellbeing.”

Aside from being the right thing to do, having such policies is a good business move, too, she says. “I felt so loyal to my company for supporting me through this moment. You can support better engagement and retention. And also doesn’t everyone want to work somewhere that cares deeply for their employees and is there for them?” Grau says. “For me, in the most devastating moment of my family’s life, having a company show up for me and support me was huge.”

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion about artificial intelligence and bias with Rachel See, Senior Counsel and Vice President of People Analytics Group at Seyfarth.

If you read too much about AI and algorithms, you can either get lost in the weeds of the tech, or you can get worried you’ll inadvertently feed bad data into bad tech and it will reproduce the very biases you are trying to avoid — and maybe even create more of them. 

For human resource executives, hiring managers and employment attorneys worried about how to properly use AI, See — who formerly served as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s senior counsel for AI and algorithmic bias — offers useful, practical and actionable advice in navigating these confusing issues.

She proposes three questions to ask yourself before using AI: What’s the business purpose? How much risk are you comfortable with? And who is responsible for that risk? Once you have answers to those questions, the path forward becomes more clear, if not necessarily easy.

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Paradiso is the vice president of HR support services for Industrial UI Services. He has led DEI efforts for the New Jersey chapter of Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and conducted trainings, workshops and lectures for employers. He says the three keys to a strong DEI culture are company policy, training and compliance. He says the common thread all three of them need to be successful is authenticity. 

“It couldn’t get more important than being authentic,” he says. “With the George Floyd incident, a lot of organizations were making statements on what they feel should have happened or should be happening, but then they never really followed through on those statements. So whatever you put in your handbook, enforce. Don’t put it in there just for words.”

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Guttman says non-competes aren’t just golden handcuffs placed on high flying executives, but they’re much more insidious than that. And it appears the FTC agrees with him, as its vote last week to ban most non-competes shows. But whether that ban will ever actually be enforced remains an open question.

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The interview is part of our AccelPro Career Tools series, where we explore topics including wellness and client relationship management. Our host is internationally recognized journalist, author and NPR host Celeste Headlee. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Beth Toth, Principal Coach and Consultant at Consulo Consulting. 

Beth has a long history working in the human facing side of business; starting in HR, she’s moved through recruiting to consulting, and has a comprehensive perspective. She has advised organizations from startups to Fortune 500s, and individuals from entry-level employees to executives.

Beth offers helpful insights on how to best manage difficult situations with clients and accomplish goals even when obstacles emerge. She describes how honesty, shared goals and an openness to others’ mindsets have allowed her to navigate relationships and help her clients move past sticking points. 

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Marie Stehmer about how to fire someone.

Stehmer has had a decades long career as an HR executive, including many years as a chief human resources officer. She walks us through best practices to make a horrible situation a little less so, both for the person receiving the news and the person delivering it. The key, she says, is to treat the person with respect.

“It’s been my experience that it lessens the chance of lawsuits,” she says. “It lessens the chance of somebody being really angry. If they walk away knowing that they’ve been treated and seen as a whole person, that helps a lot.”

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Jessica Stender about salary history bans.

Stender, the policy director and deputy legal director of Equal Rights Advocates, says salary history bans are an effective tool to stop pay discrimination. Twenty-one states, plus Puerto Rico, have laws prohibiting employers from asking prospective employees about their salary histories, and Stender says many companies are voluntarily not asking the question as a way to fight pay discrimination.

While the laws are relatively new – the first one was passed eight years ago – research shows they work in surprising ways. “The research shows that (the pay gap) shrinks for women and for workers of color,” Stender says. “So it has a two-pronged effect of stopping both gender- and race-based pay disparities from being perpetuated.”

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Gerstein is the director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative. She’s a Harvard Law School graduate who previously spent 17 years in New York government, mainly for the New York Attorney General enforcing labor laws. She describes her work there as like “Law And Order” but pursuing abusive employers.

We talk about the rise of independent contractors in recent years, the problems of misclassifying them when they should be employees and the increase in enforcement at the state and local level.

Misclassification has long been a major issue that has become even more prominent in the last few years. “It makes it really hard for the law-abiding businesses to compete with those who are misclassifying people and enjoying savings but from an illegal manner of running their business,” Gerstein says. “And then it’s also really bad for the public coffers because there are unemployment taxes that need to be paid for the safety nets that are so important for everyone, and it ends up putting a burden on everyone.”

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We discuss the challenge of surviving and thriving in the somewhat thankless industry of financial advising. Tushar offers strategies for gaining and preserving long-lasting client relationships, whether the market is up or down. We also speak about training employees and how a supportive, step-based approach can help your team successfully connect with clients and maintain their own wellbeing in a remote-work industry. 

One of the keys, Tushar maintains, to starting a successful firm in the days of AI and Google is to find a unique feature that clients are drawn to. Soft skills, and particularly good communication, are what will bring you business and make you irreplaceable.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Ben Eubanks about AI and bias.

Eubanks, the author of Artificial Intelligence for HR, blogger and podcast host, is Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research and Advisory, where he has done intensive study on the use of AI and how to identify, mitigate and prevent bias. He says one particular trait can help HR executives on this issue.

“Harvard did some really interesting research that looked at curiosity and said, ‘Hey, people who are great at curiosity, who have that muscle that are willing to stretch that muscle, they’re much less likely to believe bias,’” Eubanks says. “The curious person says, ‘I wonder how you prove that. I wonder if that’s true. How do you know?’”

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Joe Beachboard about covid and employment law.

Beachboard, who has practiced employment law for 35 years, is the chief concierge attorney at Beachboard Consulting Group. He says the long-term ramifications of covid on employment law are only beginning to emerge. Remote work, handbooks and policies, and performance management have all undergone, and are still in the midst of, significant change.

“These things are going to take years, maybe decades, to work their way through the courts,” he says. “I don’t think in any way we can say we’ve reached a new normal. We’ve got a long way to go. There’s a lot of questions that still need to be answered.”

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Feldblum served as a professor at Georgetown for 18 years, a commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for 10 years and is now Vice Chairperson of the AbilityOne Commission and a workplace consultant.

“Even when everything seems fine, I still think in terms of having a fun life and career, it’s worth thinking about change,” she says.

This is the second of two episodes with Feldblum. The first covered her career-spanning work with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and LGBTQ+ issues.

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Feldblum served as a commissioner at the EEOC for 10 years and is now vice chair of the AbilityOne Commission and a workplace consultant. In the words of Feldblum, “To achieve any lasting change in social justice, three variables must operate in synergistic fashion: law, policies and practice, and social norms.”

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Keaney walks us through the EEOC’s Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Fairness Initiative. Keaney says the EEOC has taken a broad view of technology because it changes so quickly and so often, and the law often has a hard time keeping up.

Keaney says “the main takeaway is for employers to talk to the software providers, ask questions, ask hard questions.” That way, even if you make mis-steps along the way, the EEOC appears willing to take your efforts into consideration. “The more of a due diligence background paper trail you can develop, the more likely I think you’re just not going to have as much of a headache from the EEOC on that issue,” he says.

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We discuss the detrimental effects of a lack of connection in the workplace, including anxiety, substance abuse, burnout, etc., and how this widespread issue has sharply increased with the recent rise of remote work. The lack of physical workspaces has left many, especially those who started their careers during the pandemic, isolated and dissatisfied with their jobs.

Tara offers advice on how small, sustained behavioral changes are the best way to improve these kinds of environments. Something as simple as picking up the phone to call a coworker—and avoiding Zoom fatigue—can help a team become healthier and more connected. 

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about best practices for employers hoping to avoid unionization. Our guest is David Pryzbylski, a partner at Barnes and Thornburg and blogger and thought leader on labor relations issues.

He says the key for employers hoping to avoid unionization is to forge a workplace with wages, benefits and policies strong enough that employees see no reason to organize.

The workplace landscape has changed, both socially and politically, since the pandemic. The NLRB has taken a hard-left turn, and employees have re-evaluated what they want and expect out of their employers. “People appear to be much more interested and open to the idea of unionization post-pandemic than they were pre-pandemic,” he says. “And that’s because of concerns about working conditions.”

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Non-compete agreements, as well as other restrictive covenants like non-solicitation agreements and confidentiality agreements, have drawn a lot of attention in recent years because of changing workplace norms in the post-Covid world. The FTC and NLRB also have hinted they will pursue nationwide bans.

Zweig says the key to an effective and enforceable non-compete agreement is that it has to be reasonable in terms of who gets it, what it covers and how long it lasts. He advises his clients to be circumspect about which employees to ask to sign non-competes. The CEO? Yes. The CEO’s receptionist? Not so much.  

He also pushes his clients—sometimes they don’t like it—to be less aggressive than they might want to be in terms of how long the non-compete lasts after an employee leaves. If it’s longer than a year, a court might deem it unenforceable—the very definition of unreasonable.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about workplace investigations.  

Our guest is Bernadette Sargeant, a partner at Stinson. A veteran of investigations both in private practice and government work, Sargeant walks us through how HR should decide when to hire an outside investigator to look into claims.

She names three specific times—when the complaint is against someone above you in the organizational chart, when the complaint is against HR, and when the complaint is one in a series that the company has been unable to resolve.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about the federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and other pregnancy accommodation laws. Our guest is Kameron Dawson, the senior staff attorney for A Better Balance, a legal advocacy organization.

A Better Balance produced a report called Long Overdue, which lays out the growing number of states that have passed pregnancy accommodations laws, many of them with bipartisan support and some unanimously.

The laws require companies to make reasonable accommodations, which Dawson says means “a medically necessary workplace change so that a worker can continue to do their job functions.”

That can be as simple as allowing a worker to have access to water or as complicated as setting aside time for women to pump breast milk. Dawson lays out the complicated web of factors involved in getting this right: There are safety, privacy and bias issues to consider when an employee is pregnant.

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Stender offers tips to companies on how to spot, and get rid of, pay discrimination within their payroll, including conducting a pay audit, not asking about salary histories and ensuring that you have a diverse workforce in high-paying jobs.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about workplace investigations, training and arbitration. Our guest is Lindsey Wagner, who founded Moxie, which offers workplace training and investigations to deter costly investigations and provide creative resolutions (when possible/needed) through mediation.

Wagner says the best way to handle a workplace investigation is to be ready for it before it happens. That means having policies in place and training your employees to follow them.

Some states require training, and even in those that don’t, Wagner strongly encourages her  clients to conduct it anyway. “So many times we see issues with employees where they don’t know,” she says. “They say, ‘I didn’t know that wasn’t OK. And now that I know, I won’t do it anymore.’ And so many of the issues that come into play could have been avoided by a proper education and training of employees.”

This is the first of two podcasts with Wagner. In this episode, we talk about best practices in investigations, how to avoid them in the first place, and how to resolve them once they’re completed. In the second, Wagner traces her career from a childhood spent longing to be a dolphin trainer to waking up every day excited to go to work.

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Khaing sees the history of Title VII as a mixed bag. Our court and regulatory systems are still swamped with allegations of discrimination, so the problem of inequality remains firmly entrenched in American workplace culture. But at the same time, she says, it’s better than it was when Title VII was adopted in 1964.

Khaing says some states have jumped out ahead of the federal government, with more robust laws and a deeper set of protected classes. Washington, D.C., for example, protects employees against 18 kinds of discrimination, while Title VII covers only five. She forecasts more changes, and more public arguments about them, in the near future, foreseeing new laws covering hairstyle, domestic workers and the trans community.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development.  Today we’re featuring a conversation about labor negotiations with Stephanie Sloggett-O’Dell, whose background uniquely qualifies her for this conversation.

She’s been a member of a union, an attorney for a union and a corporate vice president negotiating contracts on the management side. In other words, she’s seen every side of contract negotiations and lived to tell about it.

And what she tells are great stories about how (and how not to) conduct effective contract negotiations. The key, she says, is maintaining open lines of communication. You don’t have to like the person on the other side, but you do have to listen to them and respect them if you want to get a deal done. The supplemental materials and episode transcript are available below.

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Joining us to explain all the nuances of this complicated issue is Samantha Prince, an assistant professor of law at Penn State Dickinson Law. She says “uncertainty and volume of lawsuits” related to this issue is not sustainable, and that it’s not just a financial or book-keeping issue, it’s a health issue.

People who work without benefits such as retirement plans, paid time off or health insurance face stress-related health issues. But there’s no legal reason for it to be that way. Employers can provide benefits even to contract workers. “Some people do conflate receiving benefits with the current culture of traditional employment, which means ‘giving up your freedom,’” she says. “But there’s no rule that says that you have to give up control of your hours or how you work just because you’re receiving benefits.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about what the recent ruling in the Harvard-UNC Supreme Court case means for workplace diversity. Our guest is Stacy Hawkins, a professor at Rutgers who speaks and writes often about diversity, hiring and college admissions.

She walks us through key concepts to understand the differences and similarities between race-conscious college admissions and workplace diversity hiring efforts, discusses the search for a hiring case similar to the admissions case and lays out her passion for reviving the role-model theory as a strategy to increase the diversity of workplaces.

Hawkins also explains how she transitioned from a career in private practice to being a professor, commentator and thought leader and offers practical advice for anyone hoping to make a career change.

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Today we’re featuring a conversation about wellness and seeking help in the workplace. Our guest is Bree Buchanan, senior advisor at Krill Strategies and former Board President at the Institute for Well-Being in Law.

At firms, there may be an expectation of 24-7 availability for clients and unclear policies for employees facing behavioral health issues. Buchanan discusses signs someone may be in need, healthy habits, setting boundaries and how to ask for help.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about cannabis and the workplace. Our guest is Narcisa Przulj. She is a partner at Sandberg Phoenix who counsels employers as they wrestle with these changing laws.

Cannabis law is an emerging field in employment law. Marijuana is now legal for recreational use in more than 20 states, and that number will continue to grow. 

Employers face the complicated proposition that a substance that was illegal throughout our country’s history is now legal. What does that mean for the workplace? Should employers in states where recreational use is legal test for it? What does the law say about jobs with safety concerns? 

Przulj explains the perils of testing, the mitigating factors of safety and government contracts, and the importance of having consistent policies.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about cancer, covid and the workplace. Our guest is Ann Hodges, a professor emerita at the University of Richmond and 30-year cancer survivor. She co-founded an organization called CancerLINC, and through that she has helped countless people with cancer navigate myriad issues, including those related to employment law.

In this interview, she explains the complicated legal landscape that employers and cancer patients face in the working world, how covid is shaping the future of work for people with cancer (and other illnesses) and the conflicts of interest that administrators of disability plans deal with when deciding whether to approve benefits.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development.

Today we’re going to talk about our country’s at-will employment regime and how it favors employers over employees. Our guest is Cynthia Estlund. She is a leading and wide ranging scholar of labor and employment law and workplace governance. 

Currently a professor at NYU’s Law School, she has also taught at Harvard, Columbia and the University of Texas. We dove so deep on this issue that we turned it into two episodes. This is part one, in which we break down what at-will employment means for employees and employers and the ever-present power struggle between them. Be sure to check out part two, coming next week, in which we explore ways to rebalance that imbalance of power and search for possible solutions.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about non-compete clauses. Our guest to discuss the best ways to please both parties is Nefertari Rigsby, the Executive Director, Human Resources and Employment Law Partner for Kaplan North America.

Non-competes are a necessary, if also controversial, part of the modern employment landscape. Employees dislike them because they may hinder the ability to land a better job. But employers want them to protect their business interests. 

Rigsby previously worked in private practice in employment law and as in-house counsel and a strategic business partner for a Fortune 500 company. In this interview, she talks about best practices to craft non-competes agreeable to both sides; the complications presented by different states having different laws; and tips for how Human Resources can best approach a former entry-level employee who now has a job requiring a non-compete.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about worker classification in the entertainment world. Our guest is Anthony Panebianco, a senior associate at DarrowEverett.Classifying workers is complicated enough.

In the entertainment world, it is made more difficult because many performers would rather be classified as independent contractors even though the law says they should be employees.Panebianco has a good deal of personal experience with this issue. As a classically trained pianist, he is a performer himself. As chair of the Cape Symphony, he often hires performers. And as an attorney, he has many creatives and performers for clients. He describes the pitfalls, and how to avoid them, for companies wishing to hire entertainers and for entertainers looking to land gigs.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about discrimination, harassment and retaliation. Our guest is Carla Brown, a partner at Charlson Bredehoft Cohen Brown & Nadelhaft.

A little-known secret: Most employees, if they are victims of discrimination, harassment or retaliation, don’t want to sue. They want to keep their jobs. They want their issues resolved, not litigated. 

One of the best ways to do that is for everyone involved to listen, whether it’s a human resources executive tasked with dealing with the complaints or an attorney hired by the employee. “I think the vast majority (of lawsuits) could be avoided just by that alone,” says Brown, who has decades of experience handling such cases.

Brown joins us to talk about the differences between discrimination, harassment and retaliation, how to recognize them, and best practices to resolve such disputes.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about the changing union landscape. Our guest is Cristina Gallo, a partner at Cohen, Weiss and Simon.

Unions are creeping into new industries, the National Labor Relations Board is increasingly favoring workers’ rights, and some companies are fighting more aggressively once organization efforts start.

Having grown up in a union family and worked as a campaigner before she was a lawyer, Gallo has been in the trenches for much of her life. Today she is outside counsel for Workers United, the union representing Starbucks employees. 

In this interview, she explains the changing role of social media in organizing, the strategies Starbucks has used against organizers, and her own personal passion for workers’ rights.

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Today, we are featuring a discussion with Mike Selmi, an employment law professor and expert in algorithmic decision-making as it applies to hiring practices.

An algorithm is only as good as the people who program it and the data it analyzes. With the rise of algorithmic decision making in the hiring process has come concern in the legal community that those algorithms may be biased.

In reviewing what has been written on this topic, Selmi found plenty of concern to that effect. But then he analyzed what was actually happening, and that’s not what he found. “I haven’t seen anything that would suggest that algorithms have been more biased than humans. I suppose it could happen,” he says.

In fact, he says, “Between a computer and humans, trying to figure out which is going to be less biased, I would go with the computer.”

In this interview, Selmi walks us through the challenges of deciding which data to use, how something as simple as a name can throw off equity and how he didn’t choose employment law but is grateful it was chosen for him.

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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Maria Papasevastos.

Pay transparency is one of the most vexing issues faced by employment attorneys, companies and human resources executives. The rules vary from state to state, which is confusing enough on its own. It’s made doubly difficult because remote work means employers may be subject to laws in states in which they don’t operate. The legal complexities are compounded by cultural issues: Many employees are uncomfortable talking about how much money they make.

Our guest to sort through these issues is Maria Papasevastos. She is an Associate at Seyfarth who represents employers in multiple areas of employment law, including discrimination, harassment, retaliation and wage and hour matters.

We discuss the recent surge in adoption of pay transparency laws, the challenges employers face in complying with them and how years of performing ballet helped prepare Maria for a career in law.

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It’s common for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to change its approach when a new presidential administration takes office, especially when the new administration also represents a change of political parties.

But the degree of change in the last few years has surprised experts in the employment law space. Add that to an ever-changing work environment, and it’s never been more important for employers, human resources executives and employment attorneys to be on top of unfair labor practice issues.

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Our guest to steer us through these tumultuous waters is Stacey McClurkin Macklin. Today, she’s an attorney at Stinson, where she advises companies on a wide range of employment law issues. Before joining Stinson, she spent eight years with the NLRB, where she investigated unfair labor practice charges, educated employers on labor law and had a police escort away from a union vote.

Macklin offers best-practices advice about how to avoid NLRB investigations, how to handle them when they come up and how to deal with the NLRB’s newfound aggressive policies.

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Remember to send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235. That’s 614-64-ACCEL.

If your colleagues in any sector of the employment law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members. 

Remember to send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235. That’s 614-64-ACCEL.

If your colleagues in any sector of the employment law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.