Michael Patrick O'Brien, a lawyer with Parsons Behle & Latimer in Salt Lake City, has been practicing employment law since the Reagan administration. In 2001, he was named Utah State Bar Employment Lawyer of the Year. He's also the author of Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press, 2021), a book about growing up in a most unusual place—a Catholic Trappist monastery in rural northern Utah.
Here are some of his observations and reflections on his nearly 50 years of employment law practice.
In your career, what would you say are the biggest changes that have occurred regarding employment law and litigation?
There are so many more laws and regulations impacting the workplace today than when I started practicing law in 1986. These laws originate at all levels of government now—federal, state, agency and local. To compound this seismic change, more employers are multistate instead of just local, and many more employees work remotely, which means the first question a competent employment lawyer must ask a client today, before giving advice, is "Where does your employee live?" A good example of this change is a PTO [paid time off] policy review project we just completed for a client. This would have been a relatively simple task back in 1986. Today, that client has employees in a dozen different states, half of which have unique paid-leave law statutes. Giving HR law advice used to be providing a blanket of comfort for a client; now we must assemble a patchwork quilt!
What...
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