On July 19, 2023, the United States Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Society (BIS) released new best practices guidance for exporters dealing with medical-related items destined for Russia, Belarus, or the Occupied/Covered Regions of Ukraine. This guidance follows the May 19 tranche of export control regulations and reinforces the U.S. Government’s approach of facilitating the flows of humanitarian and medical goods while preventing their diversion to military ends. The new guidelines aim to strike that balance by providing businesses with a set of recommendations to follow to streamline and expedite the export process for medical-related items. The BIS has put forth five specific recommendations.

On June 3, 2023, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo signed into law Assembly Bill (AB) 398, which prohibits insurers from renewing or issuing insurance policies that include provisions that reduces the limit of liability by the costs of defense.

In this third installment of our Colorado Legislation Client Alert Series, we review amendments to Colorado’s Healthy Families and Workplaces Act (HFWA), which expand the permitted uses of paid sick leave to cover bereavement and inclement weather. 

The Biden-Harris Administration, along with other policymakers in the United States and internationally, have prioritized developing appropriate policy on artificial intelligence (AI) – hoping to seize the transformational benefits of AI, while managing its serious risks.

On June 28, 2023, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and His Majesty’s Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) jointly issued a Humanitarian Assistance and Food Security Fact Sheet (Fact Sheet), which clarifies certain exceptions to the broad sanctions in place against Russia to allow for continued humanitarian assistance.

In Part I of our Colorado Client Alert Series, we provided a brief overview of the recent legislative developments that impose significant new requirements on Colorado employers. In this second installment of our client alert series, we review the Protecting Opportunities and Workers’ Rights (POWR) Act (SB 23-172) in greater depth. The POWR Act expands employee workplace protections and imposes new compliance requirements on employers effective August 7, 2023.

Today, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in on the circuit split over whether freight broker tort claims are preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (“FAAAA”), 40 U.S.C. § 14501(c)(1), by holding that the plain text and the statutory scheme of the FAAAA bars a plaintiff’s state law negligent hiring claim against a freight broker and that the Act’s safety exception does not save such claims from preemption. This is excellent news for freight brokers currently defending themselves from common law state tort claims. Such brokers with pending dispositive motions should seek to add this new authority as a supplement and brokers, outside of the Ninth Circuit, whose dispositive motions have previously been denied should consider filing a motion for reconsideration.

Did an assault and battery exclusion apply when the perpetrator was legally insane? “Yes,” according to the Ohio Supreme Court in its recent decision, Krewina v. United Specialty Insurance Co., 2023-Ohio-2343 (July 12, 2023). The decision turned on two key points: first, the plain and ordinary meaning of “assault” and “battery,” which did not necessarily require a specific “intent;” and second, the fact that the assault and battery exclusion did not introduce the concept of “intent” or require any  specific “intent.” Thus, the court in Krewina ruled that a perpetrator’s insanity did not bar the application of an assault and battery exclusion in a commercial general liability policy (CGL).