Three Ward and Smith labor and employment attorneys analyzed a number of real-life situations many employers are dealing with in the current landscape.
The webinar, part of Ward and Smith's In-House Counsel virtual conference, challenged attorneys to provide solutions for workplace issues such as vaccination mandates, religious accommodations, hiring practices, and discrimination.
The session — Inside Out: Employment Law Live Action Role Play ("LARP") — used the Labor and Employment Practice Group's signature live-action role-playing (LARPing) technique to help participants understand how to navigate real-world employment law matters.
Session presenters included Ken Gray, who leads the labor and employment law group at Ward and Smith, Justin Hill, a labor and employment attorney, and Devon Williams, a labor/employment attorney who is also one of the firm's Managing Directors.
The attorneys tackled a variety of hypothetical scenarios they could face as General Counsel for ABC, Inc. To begin, the attorneys described how they would respond if the CEO of this fictional company wanted to know about the status of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) "vaccination or test weekly" mandate.
A common misconception is that all the vaccination mandates were stayed by the Fifth Circuit. "Instead, that was just the emergency temporary standard (ETS) for employers with 100 or more employees," Hill said.
The situation is continually...
In a 2017 piece in The New York Times, voting expert Ari Berman wrote, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But fo...