The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits covered entities from discriminating on the basis of disability.  Over the past ten years thousands of lawsuits – many styled as class actions – have been filed against covered entities alleging that they have failed to make their websites and mobile applications accessible.  The proliferation of litigation has been exacerbated by the failure of the Department of Justice, which is tasked with enacting regulations under the ADA’s public accommodation provisions, to issue long-anticipated regulations on how to measure digital accessibility. The lack of regulations has led to ambiguity about which standards applied, leaving covered entities largely in the dark regarding the best way to protect themselves from litigation and to accommodate persons with disabilities.

A new federal bill introduced by Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) this week would require AI companies to disclose which copyrighted works were used to train their models. The Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act would apply to both new models and retroactively to previously released and used generative AI systems.

California legislators have changed the rules of discovery in civil cases through the passage of amendments to Code of Civil Procedure sections 2016.090 and 2023.050, effective January 1, 2024.

The Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) on October 15 issued its Sanctions Compliance Guidance for Virtual Currency (the “Guidance”), which provides that sanctions compliance obligations apply to transactions utilizing virtual currencies just as they do for dealings involving traditional currencies.

In a landmark case, a jury has found a biotech executive guilty of insider trading for betting on a competitor’s stock, leveraging confidential information from his own company. This verdict marks a significant broadening of insider trading law, which is traditionally focused on misuse of nonpublic information related to one's own company or tipping others to do so.
 

The landscape of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training initiatives in the workplace is evolving rapidly. Within the last several years, we saw an increase in DEI training and corporate/client encouragement for such training initiatives. Recently, however, Title VII plaintiffs - mainly white males - are now challenging aspects of DEI training with some success. These recent DEI Title VII cases illustrate how DEI initiatives, while well-intentioned, can inadvertently expose employers to legal liabilities if not carefully implemented. 

This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit will hear a challenge to a recently-enacted Florida law, Senate Bill 264, which restricts foreign ownership or investment in Florida real property from specific countries and imposes a near ban on property purchases by Chinese, Russian and other foreign nationals.