AccelPro | Employment Law

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Craig Fisher, Talent Consultant & Author. 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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re going to talk about workplace activism. Our guest is Peter Rahbar, an employment attorney, workplace issues expert and founder of The Rahbar Group. He offers a three-step process—strategy, policies, and communication with employees—to handle whatever comes up, and with this being an election year, surely something will.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.” ---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development.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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we are going to talk about college sports and unionization. Our guest is Nellie Drew. Drew is a law professor and founder of the Center for the Advancement of Sport at the University at Buffalo. 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.---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development.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.---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. 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 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.---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we are featuring a discussion with Holly Sutton, the chair of Farella, Braun and Martel’s employment practice. 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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit insights.joinaccelpro.comWelcome 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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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.

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Laura Mitchell, Principal at Jackson Lewis. 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).---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we are featuring a discussion with Mike Strauss, the co-founder of Strauss and Strauss. 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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit insights.joinaccelpro.comWelcome 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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit insights.joinaccelpro.comWelcome 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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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.

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. This episode is free for everyone, a sample of what paid members get when they join the community.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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Erin Grau, a breast cancer survivor and co-founder of Charter, a company that focuses on the future of work. She offers tips on ways companies can codify empathy in order to create a supportive workplace for employees battling cancer.“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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit insights.joinaccelpro.comWelcome 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.---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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.

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Anthony Paradiso about how to build a strong culture rooted in diversity, equity and inclusion.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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we offer interviews and products to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Josh Guttman about non-compete agreements in light of the FTC’s recent vote to ban them.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.---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. This episode is free for everyone, a sample of what paid members get when they join the community.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. ---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit insights.joinaccelpro.comWelcome 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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit insights.joinaccelpro.comWelcome 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.”---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.Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.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.