When a worker starts saying bad things about their employer in public, it tends to raise a certain question: are they a whistleblower or are they a disgruntled employee trying to sabotage an honest company? According to Tesla, Martin Tripp, who used to work as a process technician for the…
While Stormy Daniels has been dominating headlines since news broke of her alleged affair with Donald Trump when his wife was recovering from having given birth to their son, another woman from Trump’s past is also refusing to let him forget about the misdeeds he allegedly committed with her. The…
A recent libel case in Chicago federal court involving the American Bar Association illustrates the difficulty of succeeding in a defamation claim. The litigation centered around an article published in an ABA journal in 2015. The plaintiffs comprised seven forensic handwriting experts, or “diplomates,” certified by the Board of Forensic…
Calculating and Allocating Awards Before you go about contesting any preliminary determinations, it might help to understand how the SEC goes about calculating its whistleblower awards in the first place. In general, whistleblowers who meet all the requirements are eligible to receive 10%-30% of the monetary sanctions collected by the…
Filing a Claim So, the SEC has taken your information and executed a successful enforcement action worth more than $1 million against the offender. Now what? Once the action has been successfully executed, the Office of the Whistleblower will publish a “Notice of Covered Action” on the SEC’s website, after…
Successful Enforcement It’s not enough to provide information that may or may not lead anywhere. The information provided must lead directly to a successful action against the accused person or entity in order for the whistleblower to be able to collect an award. Of course, this is only the case…
The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has been granting a record number of awards to whistleblowers alerting the authorities to securities fraud. To sweeten the deal, the awards (especially lately) tend to be in the tens of millions, and they’re only going to increase along with the amount of recovered monetary…
When entering into the employment domain, covenants are imposed on employees restricting what they can and cannot do once they leave the job. Violations and restrictions are what employers often look for when they wish to seek enforceability of a contract that was entered into when employees decide to move…
After three dismissals, a class-action consumer lawsuit filed against Barnes & Noble over a 2012 data breach has been sent back to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. In September of 2012, Barnes & Noble became aware that their credit card scanners had been compromised by…
You know how when you post a photo on Facebook of yourself with some friends and Facebook automatically prompts you to tag those people? And it doesn’t just prompt you to tag “your friends” it prompts you with their names because Facebook already knows what you and everyone else on…