On November 16, 2020, the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (OIG) issued a Special Fraud Alert addressing the fraud and abuse risks of speaker programs that are commonplace in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries ...
On November 12, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued to block the acquisition of two Memphis-area hospitals by Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare. Eleven months earlier, on December 12, 2019, Methodist entered into an agreement with Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corporation to purchase Saint Francis-Memphis and St. Francis-Bartlett (along with their associated physician practices, urgent care centers, and other ancillary care providers) for $350 million ...
The debt collection restrictions and requirements in the FDCPA, which was enacted in 1977, have failed to keep up with or even contemplate modern technologies. In particular, as methods and forms of communication have evolved, the industry has had little guidance on how it can utilize newer communication channels such as emails, text messages, or social media. In many cases, the industry has had to grapple with different and often conflicting court interpretations ...
A minority of states have enacted statutes and taken other action to protect business owners from claims by persons who allegedly were infected by COVID-19 on their premises.1 The purpose of this article is to compare these statutes and discuss some of the differences between them. This article addresses statutes in effect as of October 27, 2020. The article does not address pending legislation ...
The HHS Office for the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology issued an interim final rule on October 29, 2020, extending the compliance date for the information blocking rule under the 21st Century Cures Act to April 5, 2021 ...
The CFPB’s debt collection rule highlights the consumer’s ability to customize communication by designating specific times, places, and mediums of communication (e.g., email) as inconvenient. The consumer’s ability to customize communication will significantly impact debt collector’s communication strategies and could require substantial changes to a debt collector’s procedures and technologies ...
The CARES Act provided historic, temporary relief to mortgage holders facing Covid-19-related financial troubles. R. Aaron Chastain, partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP, looks at where mortgage lenders and servicers stand as the pandemic continues and federal agencies and state governments continue to adjust compliance requirements and rules ...
Bradley attorneys have partnered with Lexology to draft the Getting the Deal Through Employment chapter for Alabama. This guide covers a state snapshot, the employment relationship, hiring, wage and hour, discrimination, harassment and family leave, privacy in the workplace, trade secrets and restrictive covenants, labor relations and discipline and termination. With a premium Lexology account uses can use the interactive tool to create a cross border comparative report ...
Bradley attorneys have partnered with Lexology to draft the Getting the Deal Through Employment chapter for Mississippi. This guide covers a state snapshot, the employment relationship, hiring, wage and hour, discrimination, harassment and family leave, privacy in the workplace, trade secrets and restrictive covenants, labor relations and discipline and termination. With a premium Lexology account uses can use the interactive tool to create a cross border comparative report ...
The CFPB finalized its long-awaited debt collection rule. Join us this Thursday to learn about what is in the final rule, how the final rule is different from what the CFPB proposed in May 2019, and how the final rule might impact your business. The rule will become effective one year after it is published in the Federal Register ...
Michigan has joined the majority of jurisdictions in holding that a general liability policy may provide coverage for claims for property damage allegedly caused by the defective work of a subcontractor ...
The Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals (the “Board”) recently held the government liable for design delays where the government prematurely required details in design submissions and failed to provide comments on design submissions within the 14-day period allotted for government comments in the contract. In Appeal of RBC Construction Corp., the contract contemplated the use of fast track design methods ...
It is rare for the holding in a single criminal case to have such far-reaching implications that it affects nearly every industry in a particular state. But that is what happened on July 9, 2020, when the United States Supreme Court overturned Jimcy McGirt’s criminal conviction in Oklahoma state court by holding that Oklahoma did not have jurisdiction to prosecute McGirt (a citizen of the Creek tribe) for a crime committed within the boundaries of the Creek Nation ...
In Appeal of Watts Constructors, LLC, the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals (the “Board”) held that a contractor was not excused from following contract plans and specifications despite the observation by government quality assurance inspectors of non-compliant electrical work during installation ...
When crafting a liquidation or “pass-through” agreement for a subcontractor claim against the government, the key provision from the prime contractor’s perspective is a release from liability for the subcontractor’s claim with the exception of amounts recovered from the government related to that claim. If the release language is too broad, however, the agreement may provide the government a legal defense to the pass-through claim known as the Severin doctrine ...
For most of the last three decades, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama have waged a multifront water war, filing cases in federal courts across the United States. This war, and these cases, turn on apportionment of two river basins: the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) River Basin and the Alabama-Coosa- Tallapoosa (ACT) River Basin. At the heart of this legal tug of war lie competing uses—and visions—for the basins ...
On page 8 of the September–October issue, we discussed the COVID-19 forbearance landscape and related compliance challenges for mortgage servicers. In this article, we unpack the post-forbearance world, focusing on the transition out of forbearance and into other forms of loss mitigation assistance, including, but not limited to, payment deferrals, repayment plans, loan modifications, etc ...
On Sept. 3, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued its final rule on the implementation of the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard. The Fair Housing Act (FHA) prohibits discrimination in many housing-related activities on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status, and national origin ...
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released an interim final rule on October 29, 2020, delaying the implementation of the information blocking rule under the 21st Century Cures Act (Information Blocking Rule) ...
Most employers are familiar with the role of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in enforcing standards to ensure that the working men and women in the United States have a safe and healthy workplace. The current COVID-19 pandemic has presented new challenges to OSHA for reviewing how employers are protecting their employees ...
With the explosion of remote work arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic, employers are more likely to have remote employees who live in different states. A company should examine whether it is actually subject to potential jurisdiction for legal claims in each state where it has a remote employee. In other words, if your company has employees working remotely in other states, can you actually be sued in all of those states? The answer is maybe ...
One of the key refrains of national politics recently has been that we need to address, repair, and replace aging infrastructure. Of course, this leads to the core problem of funding as the amount of infrastructure construction and maintenance currently needed in the U.S. is staggering. The federal government recently put off dealing with this growing problem by extending funding for federal highway and public transportation programs for one year ...
A North Carolina court has required Cincinnati Insurance Company to provide business interruption and extra expense coverage to 16 North Carolina restaurants that lost the use of and access to their properties due to COVID-19 civil authority orders (see North State Deli, LLC, et al. v. Cincinnati Insurance Co. et al.) ...
Months of working from home have made at least one thing clear – the “Freshman 15” has nothing on the COVID-19. Boredom, stress, and ease of access to the refrigerator has caused many employees to trade in their suits for sweatpants and their heels for flip-flops. As offices see more and more employees return to work, employers may want to consider taking proactive steps to curtail such casual attire in the workplace. Can employers require a dress code? Yes ...
In these strange new days of back-to-back virtual meetings, working from home offices, home-schooling children, and social distancing from the grocery store, not to mention from most human beings—who is to say that anyone actually will read these pearls of wisdom from my sweet, dearly departed mother ...
