A review of recent legislation and jurisprudence in the areas of Labor and Employment law, including US Supreme Court rulings and agencies' guidance.

The presentation will focus on the continued viability of the McDonnell Douglas v. Green burden-shifting mechanism for summary judgment analysis.

With a combined 50+ years practicing in the employment arena, and thousands of settlement conferences under their belts as both litigators and judges, EDLA Magistrate Judges Donna Currault and Janis van Meerveld are uniquely positioned to give you winning strategies to maximize your chances of settling your case. Using as many employment-specific examples as possible, the judges will share thoughts on best practices for preparing for the conference, overcoming obstacles, breaking an impasse, post-settlement complications, non-traditional tactics, their pet peeves, and more.

 

Assistant Regional Attorney Greg Juge and Senior Trial Attorney Peter Theis will discuss recent developments and updates at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including developments in regulation and guidance, enforcement matters, and Office of General Counsel litigation filings and resolutions.

This presentation will cover administrative and case updates from the Labor Board, including the appointment of new Board members, General Counsel directives, and case law updates.

Generative AI is already present in employment litigation, and not only because lawyers are using it. Opposing counsel's brief may cite authority that does not exist. A client's screening tool, monitoring software, or personnel documentation may become the subject of the matter itself. This session assumes no prior experience with these tools. It begins with how the technology actually works, because both task selection and supervisory judgment follow from the mechanism. Participants will locate their own understanding of the technology independently of how much they use it or how they feel about it, and will learn why these systems produce fluent text that can be entirely wrong. The session then addresses which employment tasks these tools suit and which they do not, using the Learn, Develop, and Polish categories to sort the work. Confidentiality is addressed at the point where it matters, which is before information enters a prompt, using personnel files, medical records, and internal investigation notes as the working examples. A recorded demonstration shows an actual prompt and an actual output rather than describing one. The session closes with the supervisory rules. In Hill v. Workday, an employment discrimination case, the court sanctioned a supervising attorney who neither drafted nor signed the brief containing fabricated authority. Louisiana's Act 250 of 2025 now imposes verification duties on the exhibits in the file.