The Family Medical Leave Act is a federal statute that allows employees to take a certain amount of leave time for very important events such as, for example, the birth of a child or to care for a very close family member. To fall within that statute, the employee has to work for a certain…
Continue reading ›A fiduciary duty is the highest level of duty the law recognizes. It requires the fiduciary to place the interests of the beneficiary ahead of the fiduciary’s. In other words, whatever the transaction the fiduciary is engaging in, it has to be solely for the benefit of the beneficiary or the client.
Continue reading ›Typically, neither the employee nor the employer has to give a notice of termination. There can be exceptions to that. The most common exception, if there’s a written contract, one party has agreed to give a certain amount of written notice to the other party. If that happens, then the contract will trigger certain events…
Continue reading ›If a person is laid off and a younger person is kept, that’s not necessarily discrimination. It’s possible but not necessarily. There could be valid business reasons that the employer would have to retain a more junior employee, because, for example, their pay was substantially less than the person who’s laid off, or their work…
Continue reading ›Sometimes employees will lose their job if they blew the whistle. Sometimes the employees have not legitimately blown the whistle, but they’re simply trying to protect themselves from their own actions of the business and they’re trying to come with something to get back at the employer. Other times employees are legitimately objecting to activities…
Continue reading ›Florida statutes on non-competition covenants allow courts to modify overbroad non-competition covenants. For example, a non-competition covenant restricting an employee from competing against the employer in every county in Florida is likely overbroad if the employer conducts business only in Broward County. Florida statutes, however, allow the court to modify such overbroad non-competition covenants and…
Continue reading ›Florida law requires that courts read non-competition covenants in favor of providing reasonable protection to a company’s legitimate business interest and prohibits courts from reading the non-competition covenant narrowly against the restraint. Anarkali Boutique, Inc. v. Ortiz, 104 So. 3d 1202 (Fla. 4th DCA 2012) provides an example of just how broadly Florida courts could…
Continue reading ›What happens when a person writes a new will, revokes his or her previous valid will, and the probate court later determines that the new will is invalid? Usually, the person will be considered to have died intestate, i.e., without a will, and his or her property will be distributed according to the Florida intestate…
Continue reading ›When two parties commit the same wrongdoing and are equally at fault, the court generally will not get involved in their transaction. That rule is known as the doctrine of “in pari delicto.” The doctrine of in pari delicto generally will apply to various forms of unlawful contracts. For example, if two parties enter into…
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