Resources

In our prior article on United States v. Heppner, we discussed whether a litigant’s conversations with artificial intelligence are protected as privileged or work product. Since Heppner, three additional court decisions have been rendered which complicate the landscape, particularly in the context of pro selitigants.

Federal contractors operate in one of the most heavily regulated employment environments in the country. In addition to traditional employment laws, contractors must navigate obligations tied to federal contracts, agency oversight, and specialized whistleblower protections.

As part three of our series, we turn to people. Money may be the traditional first and most accurate answer when asking what is worrying nonprofit leaders; however, staffing and talent are close behind. In most organizations, these two topics are really the same issue.

Nonprofit boards are under increasing pressure to recruit, retain, and support strong executive leadership. That is no small task. Nonprofit executives are expected to manage staff, satisfy funders, support boards, maintain community relations, oversee budgets, comply with expanding legal obligations, and advance the organization’s mission—often with fewer resources than their for-profit counterparts. Against that backdrop, paid sabbaticals for nonprofit executives are getting more attention.

Employers who pay bonuses to nonexempt employees need to understand a deceptively simple wage-and-hour rule: overtime must be paid based on the employee’s regular rate of pay, not merely on the employee’s base hourly rate. When an employee receives commissions, shift differentials, incentive pay, production bonuses, attendance bonuses, or other compensation tied to their work performance, additional compensation may need to be included in the regular rate of pay used to calculate overtime pay.

Does your Virginia business provide activities that pose a meaningful risk of physical injury such as horseback riding, fitness classes, recreational sports, camps, or similar customer-facing services? Does your business rely on customer “waivers” of liability to manage the risks inherent in such activities? That instinct is understandable. A written agreement that warns customers of danger confirms that participation is voluntary, and states that the customer accepts responsibility for injuries sounds like it should provide strong legal protection if something goes wrong. In the Commonwealth of Virginia, however, the legal picture is more complicated.

As the United States prepares for the semi quincentennial on July 4, 2026, Washington, D.C. is not just hosting the national commemoration. It is building for it. America 250 has accelerated attention on public spaces, historic assets, transportation support, accessibility, and visitor infrastructure across the region.

On April 22, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued a long-anticipated Notice of Proposed Rulemaking addressing joint employer status under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA). The proposed rule seeks to impose a single analytical framework across all three statutes and to bring coherence to an area of law that has become increasingly fragmented.

Artificial intelligence is no longer an experimental feature in federal procurement. It is rapidly becoming essential digital infrastructure used to analyze data, support decision‑making, automate workflows, and power mission‑critical systems across civilian agencies (non-military federal agencies such as the DHS, HHS, and Treasury) to analyze data, support decision-making, and automate workflows.

Section 875 of the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act creates a new payment-withholding risk for certain incumbent Department of Defense contractors that file GAO bid protests. The provision directs DoD to revise the DFARS to establish procedures allowing contracting officers to withhold up to five percent of payments owed to an incumbent contractor during a protest-related bridge contract or extension. The withheld amount is forfeited only if GAO finally dismisses the protest for lacking any reasonable legal or factual basis.

As part two of our series, it is perhaps a truism that the first answer would always be money. The need for consistent and appropriate resources to execute on mission is a constant drumbeat for nonprofits. What is new is the pace of change, rapid shifts in sources of funds, changes in demand for services, and the constancy of stress and disruption.

Virginia employers are standing at the edge of one of the most consequential shifts in workplace regulation the Commonwealth has seen in decades. During the 2026 General Assembly session, lawmakers enacted two sweeping paid leave measures — the Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) insurance program and a new statewide paid sick leave mandate — that together reshape how Virginia businesses must approach employee leave, payroll administration, and risk management moving forward.

Smart glasses, fitness trackers, smartwatches, body cams, and location-based wearables have moved quickly from novelty to mainstream tools—both in consumer life and in the workplace. For employers, these technologies promise productivity, safety, and efficiency gains. They also create a fast-expanding set of privacy, surveillance, and compliance risks that are still poorly understood.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court released its opinion in Hencely v. Fluor– reversing the Fourth Circuit, which relied on the “battlefield” preemption rule to dismiss the individual’s tort claims against Fluor. An independent contractor of Fluor’s subcontractor carried out a suicide attack at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The plaintiff, Hencely, intervened and stopped the suicide bomber from detonating the bomb in a larger area.

With record spring heat impacting the eastern half of the United States, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has taken significant additional steps to elevate workplace heat hazards to the forefront of its enforcement agenda. On April 10, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor announced a substantial update to OSHA’s National Emphasis Program (NEP) for Outdoor and Indoor Heat-Related Hazards, which was originally issued in April 2022.

March 2026 materials from the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights (OHR) provide employers with a useful snapshot of the agency’s continuing focus on harassment reporting, workplace investigations, and employee training obligations. Although OHR did not release a formal new harassment rule package in March, the agency did update its notices, fact sheets, and training-related guidance tied to the D.C. Human Rights Act and the Tipped Wage Workers Fairness Amendment Act.

On March 31, 2026, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude artificial intelligence system, accidentally published the entire source code of a product called Claude Code inside a routine software update. A missing line in a configuration file shipped 512,000 lines of proprietary code to the public. No hack. No breach. Human error.

On March 26, 2026, the White House fundamentally reframed how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are evaluated in the context of federal contracts. With the issuance of Executive Order 14398, “Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors,” DEI is no longer treated primarily as a cultural or human-capital initiative. Instead, for covered contractors and subcontractors, DEI has become an express contractual risk factor, carrying the potential for termination, suspension, debarment, and False Claims Act liability.

In 2012, financier and Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick made a transformative donation to his alma mater, Haverford College, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. Over time, Lutnick’s contributions — reportedly totaling roughly $65 million — helped fund major campus initiatives, including the college’s library, which now bears his name. More than a decade later, the institution finds itself confronting a difficult governance question. Following renewed scrutiny surrounding Lutnick’s past associations with Jeffrey Epstein, Haverford students and community members have begun asking whether the college should reconsider the recognition attached to that gift.

When you restructure into a C corporation for qualified small business stock (QSBS) treatment but miss even one of Section 1202’s technical requirements, the IRS can deny the exclusion entirely—even if the business itself is an ideal candidate. The central risk in S-corp / LLC-to-C-corp planning is that the restructuring steps are easy to do “almost right,” yet still fail the original-issuance, eligibility, or documentation rules that QSBS depends on.