Business Workshop: Electronically stored information, pregnancy bias cases
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ESI won't be easy
Amendments to federal court rules have created a new set of rules for discovery of "electronically stored information" (ESI) that will set both small and large business scurrying to make sure they are saving the electronic documents they should save, and not saving those they should destroy.
A recent study showed that 93 percent of all business information is stored on computers and that about 87 percent of all written business communications are e-mails. But ESI includes not just the information on company computers, but also what's on DVDs, CD ROMs, digital cameras, answering machines, PDAs and cell phones.
The new amendments cover e-discovery -- the ability to request access to and copies of electronic documents in the discovery process of legal proceedings. The federal courts essentially are saying that ESIs are to be treated the same way as paper documents. For example, businesses have always had to keep tax-related information for seven years. It is now important that businesses have similar retention policies for their electronic records -- otherwise they may remain open for discovery indefinitely and destruction of such records, outside of policy directives, could result in adverse findings by a court.
That seems easy enough. The ESI challenge for business, though, is to implement a standard set of policies to save electronic information throughout the company, from the individual e-mails of every employee to the home computers occasionally used for company business.
-- Ronald L. Hicks Jr.,
Meyer Unkovic & Scott LLP, rlh@muslaw.com
Pregnancy bias complaints
Pregnancy discrimination complaints and lawsuits against employers are on the rise.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission statistics say that pregnancy discrimination complaints have jumped by 31 percent since the early 1990s. The value of pregnancy discrimination claims settled before a lawsuit is started has tripled in that time. The EEOC itself is now filing five times as many pregnancy discrimination lawsuits annually as it did 10 years ago.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act have long made it illegal to discriminate against pregnant women in the workplace. The EEOC says it believes that the current rise in pregnancy discrimination lawsuits stems from greater awareness of employment rights, corporate downsizing and greater participation of women in the work force.
For employers, the key to avoiding pregnancy discrimination lawsuits is to treat pregnant women the same as other employees. Some examples: Pregnancy-related benefits can't be limited to married employees, an employer shouldn't single out pregnancy-related conditions when determining an employee's ability to work or do a task and an employer cannot refuse to hire a pregnant woman solely because of her pregnancy.
As with many discrimination issues, nothing insulates an employer from a lawsuit as well as fair and consistent treatment of all employees.
-- Elaina Smiley,
Meyer Unkovic & Scott, es@muslaw.com
First Published February 21, 2007 12:00 am
