TUESDAY APRIL 22, 2008
7:30am - 8:20am — Breakfast, B21 Bookstore Open, Networking
8:20am - 8:30am — Welcoming Remarks
8:30am - 9:30am — Employment Law Trends 2008: The Year Ahead
A comprehensive survey of the employment law landscape and an update on critical legal rulings that practicing HR professionals, senior managers, and employment law attorneys need to know. Includes wage and hour updates, case studies, overview of recent legislative developments, and practical legal guidance for 2008 and beyond. Topics and trends will include:
- Avoid new hiring and promotion traps that come with Web 2.0, video resumes, and electronic recruiting
- The death of the “stray remark” defense for harassment and discrimination cases
- How the courts are extending the scope and timeframes of retaliation claims
- How to meet new requirements for your compliance policies to be audience-appropriate
- How violating your own progressive discipline policy can create new liabilities
- Why hollow threats of firing someone – but NOT doing it – can lead to “negligent retention” lawsuits
- FMLA updates and how even a change in someone’s personality can put you on FMLA notice
- How far you must – and must not – go in informally “diagnosing” FMLA-qualifying conditions
- How NOT engaging employees in “interactive discussion” can trigger ADA liability
- How firing an employee who’s sleeping on the job can get you in legal trouble
- How to balance consistency and context in termination cases
9:30am - 10:50am — Best Practices for HR Around Recruiting, Interviewing, Hiring, and Promotions
Recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotions are a legal minefield. You want your hiring managers to push hard and probe deeply to make sure they get the right “fit” – that is, the person with exactly the right capabilities, attitude and work ethic. But the deeper they probe, the more selective they are, and the higher the standard they set – the greater their risk of provoking a lawsuit. As an HR professional or employment law attorney, your knowledge needs to go even deeper than just what you can and can’t say and do – and that’s what this session will provide - detailed developments, lessons learned from recent court cases, and practical advice you can act on immediately. In this high-energy session, co-facilitated by Wal-Mart’s Vice President of HR for the Midwest Division, participants will learn:
- How to write a job description for today that will move your business forward tomorrow
- How to validate competencies for hiring, promotions, and training
- How to effectively – and legally - advertise internally, externally, and on the web
- How and why you have a much higher chance of being sued by an applicant than an employee
- How to avoid liability when working with internal and external recruiters
- How to review, filter, sort, and qualify applicants both thoroughly and legally
- How to ensure that your underlying values are incorporated into your recruiting practices
- How to do everything above without violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
11:00 - 12:20 pm — Discrimination & Harassment: Case Law Update
It's a new age of discrimination, where employees can and will sue if they feel they were discriminated against due to age, gender, national origin, race or anything else. This session will raise your awareness about new types of discrimination lawsuits and what you and your company must do to prevent them. Catch up with all the changes in discrimination and workplace harassment case law and learn how you can bulletproof your organization with the latest legal advice and Human Resource strategies. This session will cover:
- What you can learn from the Isiah Thomas sexual harassment verdict
- How to prove you took “prompt effective action” – how fast is fast, how effective is effective?
- Documentation practices to protect yourself when employees sue
- How something as simple as playing music in the workplace can create a hostile environment
- How refusing to hire people with a criminal past can get you in trouble
- The recent court crackdown on religious issues in hiring and promotions
- Who can put your company on notice (Hint: it’s not always the employee)
- How to avoid claims that your reporting procedures are “too confusing” - and thus irrelevant in court
- Your new responsibility for providing compliance and reporting hotlines in 2008
- Who is liable as ‘management’ and who isn’t, regardless of your organization chart
12:30pm - 1:40pm — Lunch, B21 Bookstore Open
1:40 - 3:00 pm — Workplace Investigations
The better your organization handles employee complaint investigations, the less likely you’ll ever get dragged into a costly, time-consuming lawsuit. And if you do find yourself in court – accused of retaliation, invasion of privacy, bias toward either the accused or the accuser, failure to take decisive action, lack of documentation, or several of the above – you’ll find that an airtight investigation can be your best defense. Learn how to design and conduct investigations into all sorts of employee complaints and avoid the often unpredictable traps investigators fall into. Also find out how to deal with the tension investigators feel trying to achieve two, often conflicting, goals: 1) maintaining confidentiality and 2) digging deep to gather sufficient evidence. You will learn:
- New criteria for when you have to initiate a workplace investigation
- Identifying what’s “horseplay” and what’s a hostile work environment
- Who should conduct an investigation?
- What are the most important qualities of an investigator
- How to plan an effective investigation
- How to start and end each witness interview
- Key questions for effective interviewing
- Proper follow up and what to do after the interviews
- What to consider in determining whether to draft a report and what to include in the report
- How – and what - to communicate back to the parties without violating privacy rights
3:10 - 4:30 pm — The Tangled Web of FMLA, ADA, and Performance Documentation
Most employers assume that if they give an employee 12 weeks of leave to comply with the FMLA, their obligation to this employee is finished. However, if the employee also is disabled, the employer’s duty under the ADA may be just beginning. And then what happens if this person is also a poor performer? Does documenting their poor performance obviate the need to worry about a possible discrimination claim down the road? Absolutely not. HR professionals and employment law experts agree that one of the toughest aspects of implementing the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is coordinating the law with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and documenting any related – or unrelated – performance problems. In this session, you’ll learn:
- How much medical knowledge are you really responsible for in court?
- Distinguishing disruptive behavior from a serious medical conditions
- How selective enforcement of certain policies can trigger reverse discrimination suits
- How comparing one employee’s performance to another can lead to serious legal trouble
- How to deal with legitimate performance problems of people who return from FMLA leave without triggering legal liability
- What protections does FMLA intermittent leave give employees - and what’s not protected
- How an organization-wide performance management program protects you from legal exposure to FMLA and ADA “traps”
- How to avoid retaliation charges when dealing with an employee who has exercised their ADA or FMLA rights
- How to look at your case “through the eyes of a jury” even before any claims are filed
6:15pm - 7:30 pm — Business 21 Cocktail Reception and Networking
Join us for drinks and hors d’oeuvres with beautiful floor-to-ceiling twilight views of downtown Chicago. Enjoy networking and meet the employment law experts 1-on-1.