If you are a small business owner, you may often consider how you can give back to the community or make a charitable use of your commercial property. Picture this: A local nonprofit is hosting a 5K race and asks to use your business’s parking lot as a pre-race staging area. While you would like to help out the nonprofit (and get some good PR in the process), you are concerned about liability. If someone gets hurt at the race, could your business be sued for its involvement? The old saying is that “no good deed goes unpunished,” but, with …
Record Payout for Racial Discrimination by Merrill Lynch
A recent case demonstrates how dangerous it is when an employer does not monitor the workplace to ensure equal opportunity. In what could be a record payment to settle an American class action suit for racial discrimination, Merrill Lynch agreed in August to pay $160 million to black brokers and trainees who worked at the firm since 2001. The lead plaintiff in the case, 68-year-old George McReynolds, has worked at the firm since 1983 and remained at the firm during the pendency of the suit. An estimated 1,200 people may have a claim in the settlement. Allegations made during the …
When Employees Commit Electronic Theft
For business owners, holding an edge in the market depends on safe communication and storage of data and proprietary information. While theft of trade secrets once conjured up the image of cumbersome files bring stuffed into a briefcase, loss of essential data now occurs with the simple click of a mouse. In August, two New York men were charged with compiling and stealing information from their employer with the intention of using it to start their own business. The info allegedly taken from their employer, Manhattan-based Flow Traders, included proprietary computer code, trade strategies, and valuation algorithms. According to the …
Supreme Court Asked to Decide If Corporations Have Religious Freedom
As discussed in an earlier blog post, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) created a controversy about whether for-profit corporations have religious freedom. The issue concerns the requirement under ACA that health insurance sufficient to avoid penalties must include coverage for certain forms of birth control. Businesses closely held by families with strong religious convictions are objecting to this requirement as an infringement of religious freedom. In June Hobby Lobby and Mardel, Christian corporations owned by the same family, received a court order preventing the federal government from enforcing the contraception requirement and any related penalties. Also in …
Do For-Profit Corporations Have Religious Freedom?
A provision under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has raised the question of whether for-profit corporations have religious freedom. The ACA through guidelines from the Health Resources and Services Administration requires that non-grandfathered group health plans and individual health insurance cover, without cost to the individual, all FDA-approved contraceptive methods. The FDA-approved methods include contraception known as the “morning-after pill” and the “week-after pill”, which the FDA has acknowledged can terminate pregnancy after conception. While exemptions for contraception coverage have been made for religious non-profit corporations, no exemptions are available to for-profit corporations. In Oklahoma (10th Circuit …
Social Media and Employee Rights
The rise of social media in the last several years has led to a pattern of people pouring out every detail of their personal lives – from the mundane to the potentially damaging – for the world to see. Understandably, this has led to a variety of clashes with employers over issues ranging from social media use at work, to posting of disparaging comments, to workers’ compensation fraud. A recent ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should give employers throughout the United States a moment of pause. While employees who disparage their employers online might expect that this …
Your Business May be Owed a Tax Return
Getting an unexpected bonus is always nice, especially if you own a small business. On December 18, 2012, Ohio Governor Kasich and Tax Commissioner Joe Testa announced that the Ohio Department of Taxation (ODT) is implementing a new policy of notifying business taxpayers of potential tax overpayments, beginning with the Commercial Activity Tax (CAT). The ODT has already identified about 3,500 CAT taxpayers that may be eligible for refunds totaling $13.7M. ODT believes that approximately 11,000 CAT taxpayers will be eligible for tax refunds. ODT will send letters to all potentially eligible business taxpayers notifying them that they may be …
Employing Minors in Ohio — What You Need to Know
There was a time when child labor was a major problem in the United States. While that era has largely passed, employers who hire children under the age of 18 are still subject to a number of restrictions. It can be easy for businesses that only periodically employ minors to overlook these statutory requirements, leading to trouble down the road. Ultimately, Ohio’s minor employment laws are not overly burdensome so long as employers are aware that the laws exist and learn about their responsibilities. The Ohio Minor Labor Law considers any person under the age of 18 who has not …
What Is Portability and Why Should I Care?
It is official: Congress made the lifetime $5M (adjusted for inflation) estate and gift tax exemption permanent at the end of 2012. For individuals who die in 2013, $5.25M of their lifetime and at death transfers are excluded from the 40% estate and gift tax. Congress also did married couples an additional favor – they also made portability permanent. Portability allows a married couple to combine their lifetime exclusion amounts – $10.5M per couple in 2013. If one spouse dies having used less than their $5.25M exclusion amount, their surviving spouse may add the remainder to their own personal exclusion …
Welcome
Welcome to the Coolidge Wall, Co., L.P.A. blog. Our Dayton, Ohio office handles cases involving business and corporate law. We are dedicated to forming relationships with entrepreneurs and business owners as we help them through the legal issues that come with starting and running a business. For 165 years, our firm has provided clients throughout Ohio with trustworthy and dependable representation. Through this blog, our goal is to educate, inform and share important news and insights about corporate and business law. The more you know about the law, the better prepared you can be to help your business grow and …