Keep Up with Current Employment Law Issues

As is widely known, many technological advancements have been integrated into the legal industry in recent decades. Maintaining an electronic record of all information is standard operating procedure at large and small companies and law firms. Another major development, in the last half dozen or so years, in particular, has been the dramatic increase in the number of employees who telecommute one or more days a week and in many instances full time. Indeed, there are now virtual companies and law firms which maintain limited, if any, office space. These parallel developments necessarily raise questions concerning the ability of companies and law firms alike to maintain the confidentiality of proprietary information.

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In the Digital Information Age, where electronic data containing confidential information is so easily transferable, employers face a dilemma. On the one hand, they generally want to allow employees as much access to information as possible to promote efficient and uninterrupted workflow. On the other hand, there is always the risk that employees with access to highly sensitive information may misplace hard copies and/or flash drives containing such information or purposefully take key information to use on behalf of a competing future employer, for a business they have started or intend to start, or to damage the company because of a personal vendetta.  
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In recent years, as the use of social media has exploded, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) has received allegations of improper discipline of employees for social media postings as well as complaints condemning employer social networking policies. We briefly discuss a few of those decisions below.

In what came to be known as “the first Facebook case,” American Medical Response of Connecticut, Inc., No. 34-CA-12576, an employee criticized her supervisor in a Facebook post for denying her Union representation, which triggered responses from co-workers voicing their support. The employee was suspended the following day and later discharged. The NLRB alleged in a complaint that the employer’s internet and social media policies were overly broad and violated Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (the “NLRA” or “Act”), which gives employees the right “to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
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