Jason M. Knott

Section 1514A of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act shields a whistleblower from retaliation if he reports “conduct [that he] reasonably believes” violates certain laws, including Securities and Exchange Commission regulations.  Last month, the Sixth Circuit held that the question of a whistleblower’s “reasonable belief” is a “simple factual question requiring no subset of findings that the employee had a justifiable belief as to each of the legally-defined elements of the suspected fraud.”  Rhinehimer v. U.S. Bancorp Investments, Inc., No. 13-6641 (6th Cir. May 28, 2015).  Based on this principle, the court affirmed a $250,000 verdict in favor of the plaintiff, Michael Rhinehimer.

According to the Court’s opinion, Rhinehimer was a financial planner for U.S. Bancorp who helped his elderly customer, Norbert Purcell, set up a trust and a brokerage account.  In November 2009, Rhinehimer went on disability leave, and asked a colleague not to conduct any transactions with Purcell.  The colleague didn’t follow the instructions, and instead put Purcell into investments that Rhinehimer believed were unsuitable.  (Unsuitability fraud under the securities laws occurs when a broker knows or reasonably believes certain securities to be unsuitable to a client’s needs, but recommends them anyway.)    Rhinehimer complained about the trades, but his superiors warned him that he should “stay out of the matter” and stop criticizing the colleague.  After Rhinehimer hired a lawyer, he was placed on a performance improvement plan and fired after he failed to meet it.

• Civil Litigation
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act
• Whistleblowers
• Wrongful Termination

Last May, we covered a decision by a Michigan federal court that torpedoed Debourah Mattatall’s claims against her former employee, Transdermal Corporation.  Now, thanks to a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Mattatall’s claims have been brought back to life.

To briefly recap the facts, Mattatall used to own a company called DPM Therapeutics Corporation.  She sold it to Transdermal and entered into a Stock Purchase Agreement and Employment Agreement with that company.  According to Mattatall, Transdermal didn’t comply with its obligations, and she sued it in federal court.  But the court quickly granted summary judgment, finding that Mattatall gave up her claims in a settlement agreement that resolved other litigation against her.

In that litigation, DPM’s minority shareholders challenged the sale to Transdermal, and Transdermal countersued those shareholders.  The parties to the litigation, including Mattatall, resolved the dispute and entered into a settlement agreement and a general release.  The release stated that “Transdermal, DPM, [another controlling owner], and Mattatall and each [minority shareholder] … release[d], waive[d] and forever discharge[d] each other” from any claims arising before the agreement was signed.  In Mattatall’s subsequent lawsuit against her employer, Transdermal, the district court ruled that this language released all claims that any party to the agreement had against any other party – even though Transdermal and Mattatall were on the same side in the shareholder litigation, and Transdermal reassured Mattatall that she wasn’t releasing her unrelated claims against it before she signed.  Because her claims against Transdermal fell within the “unambiguous” and “broadly worded” terms of the release, this evidence was irrelevant, and Mattatall was out of court.

• Breach of Contract
• Civil Litigation
• Summary Judgment

After firing its head patent attorney, Steven Trzaska, L’Oreal is now under fire from Trzaska in New Jersey federal court.  On April 16, 2015, Trzaska sued L’Oreal, claiming that his firing violated New Jersey’s Conscientious Employee Protection Act (“CEPA”).

In his complaint (available at Law360), Trzaska alleges that L’Oreal had a quota for its New Jersey office of 40 filed patent applications in 2014.  But, Trzaska contends, an outside consultant had previously found that many of L’Oreal’s patent applications were purely cosmetic, saying that “the vast majority of its inventions were of low or poor quality.”  Trzaska alleges that his superiors pressured him to file applications to meet the quota.  However, he told them that “neither he nor the patent attorneys who reported to him were willing to file patent applications that the attorneys believed were not patentable.”  Soon after, L’Oreal terminated him, saying that it was hiring a new “head of patents of the Americas.”  Trzaska claims that this explanation was pretext and that the company in fact fired him because he refused to file applications that were not patentable.

How do Trzaska’s claims line up with CEPA? 

• Civil Litigation
• Whistleblowers
• Wrongful Termination

Last summer, we covered in depth the resounding repercussions from American Apparel’s decision to terminate its CEO and founder, Dov Charney.  Now, the sequel has arrived – and it promises lots of action.

Matt Townsend of Bloomberg Business reports that Charney has resumed his arbitration against his former employer, in which he is seeking $40 million from the clothing company.  Charney previously agreed to put his claims on hold while American Apparel made its final decision about whether to terminate him.  After an investigation, the board decided in December to cut Charney loose. 

• Arbitration
• Civil Litigation
• Executive Compensation

The ongoing trial in Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers has made headline news across the country.  It’s being covered by the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, among other national publications.  Those interested in following the trial can monitor the #ellenpao hashtag on Twitter, or watch liveblogs from Re/code or the San Jose Mercury-News.

Why is the trial so newsworthy?  As we reported here, Pao claims that Kleiner Perkins, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm, discriminated against her because of her gender and then retaliated because she complained.  She claims that she was not promoted to a plum senior partner position because she was a woman, and that the firm fired her because she complained and later sued it.  Her story involves sex, boorish behavior, and office intrigue that ranges from the mundane to the highly dramatic.

With that introduction, here are some -- of many -- takeaways for employers from what has transpired thus far:

• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination
• Title VII

LSU is used to battling with its Southeastern Conference (SEC) foes on the gridiron.  Now, it’s fighting in court with a former assistant who jumped ship to conference rival Texas A&M. 

John Chavis, LSU’s ballyhooed former defensive coordinator, left LSU for A&M at the beginning of this year, sparking headlines about “winning big” at his new home in College Station.  But storm clouds were brewing – LSU’s athletic director, Joe Alleva, said that he expected Chavis to comply with a $400,000 contractual buyout. 

On February 27, Chavis sued LSU in Texas state court, seeking to avoid the buyout.  He named A&M as a defendant as well, but only as an “indispensable party,” reported Jerry Hinnen of cbssports.com.  The Associated Press reported that A&M agreed to pay the buyout for Chavis if he was found to owe it.

LSU, seeking a home field against Chavis, quickly filed a separate case against him in Baton Rouge, claiming that it is entitled to receive the buyout money.

 Chavis’s contract reportedly said that if Chavis left in the first 11 months of his contract, before January 31, 2015, he would have to pay the buyout.   The sequence of events appears to be that Chavis gave a required 30-day notice on January 5 that he was resigning and terminating his contract.  Chavis says that he left LSU by February 4 – after the January 31 end to the buyout period – and didn’t join the Aggie payroll until February 13. 

• Breach of Contract
• Civil Litigation
• Termination With or Without Cause

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard argument in the religious discrimination case of EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc., which made our list as one of our five issues to watch for 2015.  The case arises under Title VII, the federal law that makes it illegal for an employer “to discriminate against any individual with respect to h[er] compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s . . . religion.”  The EEOC alleges that Abercrombie, purveyor of “authentic American clothing,” discriminated against Samantha Elauf on religious grounds.  The company refused to hire Elauf because she wore a headscarf, or hijab, to her job interview, and the company’s “Look Policy” prohibited employees from wearing “caps.” 

In earlier depositions in the case, Elauf’s interviewer at Abercrombie testified that she “assumed that [Elauf] was Muslim,” and “figured that was the religious reason why she wore her head scarf.”  The interviewer said that she went to her district manager to discuss the headscarf issue, and told him that “[Elauf] wears the head scarf for religious reasons, I believe.”  The interviewer testified that the district manager then told her not to hire Elauf because of the headscarf and said, “[S]omeone can come in and paint themselves green and say they were doing it for religious reasons, and we can’t hire them.”  As a result, the interviewer lowered Elauf’s “appearance” score on her evaluation, and Elauf didn’t get the job.

Despite this testimony, the Tenth Circuit still entered summary judgment for Abercrombie, holding that the EEOC’s discrimination claim could not proceed to trial because Elauf “never informed Abercrombie prior to its hiring decision that she wore her headscarf or ‘hijab’  for religious reasons and that she needed an accommodation for that practice, due to a conflict between the practice and Abercrombie’s clothing policy.” 

The fact that the Tenth Circuit granted summary judgment, even though the interviewer admitted that she assumed that Elauf wore the scarf for religious reasons, helps explain the concerns, and potential solutions, that the Justices raised in yesterday’s argument. 

• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination
• Religious Discrimination‎
• Title VII

Silicon Valley is buzzing about the trial in Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers LLP, which got underway on Tuesday.  According to USA Today, a UC-Berkeley professor says that you “can’t be within a stone’s throw of the Valley without hearing” about the case.

The cast of characters (described here by the San Francisco Business Times) includes a number of heavy hitters, including Pao herself.  Pao, a graduate of Princeton, Harvard Law, and Harvard Business School, is now the CEO of Reddit.  Kleiner Perkins is a well-known venture capital firm in Menlo Park, a city that has been described as the “center of the venture capital universe.”

Pao’s allegations are explosive.  She contends that she had a brief affair with a married junior partner who continued to harass her after she broke off their relationship.  Her claims about the firm go deeper than just this harassment; she contends that the firm had an overarching culture of discrimination against women, culminating in her dismissal in October 2012. 

• Arbitration
• Civil Litigation
• Discrimination
• Wrongful Termination

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s whistleblower protection provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1514A, allows a wrongfully terminated whistleblower to recover “all relief necessary to make [her] whole.”  18 U.S.C. § 1514A(c)(1).  The statute then goes on to say that compensatory damages include reinstatement, back pay, and “special damages,” including expert fees and reasonable attorneys fees.  In an opinion issued this week, the Fourth Circuit held that Sarbanes-Oxley damages don’t just include these enumerated damages.  Rather, an employee can obtain other compensation for harm, including emotional distress damages.  Jones v. SouthPeak Interactive Corp. of Delaware, Nos. 13-2399, 14-1765 (4th Cir. Jan. 26, 2015).

The plaintiff in the case, Andrea Gail Jones, was the former chief financial officer of SouthPeak, a video game manufacturer.  According to the opinion, in 2009, SouthPeak wanted to buy copies of a video game for distribution, but didn’t have the cash to buy the games up front.  Instead, SouthPeak’s chairman, Terry Phillips, personally fronted Nintendo over $300,000.  When SouthPeak didn’t record this debt, Jones raised a stink, eventually telling the company’s outside counsel that the company was committing fraud.  The same day, the company’s board fired her. 

• Civil Litigation
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act
• Whistleblowers
• Wrongful Termination

Last November, we covered the Supreme Court oral argument in the case of Department of Homeland Security v. MacLean.  As a refresher, MacLean was an air marshal who was fired by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after he blew the whistle to MSNBC on the agency’s plan to cancel marshal missions to Las Vegas.  After the argument, Prof. Steve Vladeck of American University predicted that the TSA would lose the case.

He was right.  On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued its opinion, in which it held in favor of MacLean.  The TSA argued that it could fire MacLean because his disclosures were “specifically prohibited by law” in two ways: first, it had adopted regulations on sensitive security information, which applied to the information MacLean disclosed; second, a provision of the U.S. Code had authorized TSA to adopt those regulations.  Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, rejected both arguments. 

As to the regulations, he wrote, Congress could have said that whistleblowers were not protected if their disclosures were “specifically prohibited by law, rule, or regulation,” but did not.  Thus, its choice to only use the word “law” appeared to be deliberate.  Further, interpreting the word “law” broadly “could defeat the purpose of the whistleblower statute,” because an agency could insulate itself from liability by promulgating a regulation that prohibited whistleblowing.  And as to the argument that Congress-passed “law” prohibited the disclosure, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the statute in question did not prohibit MacLean’s disclosures.  Instead, it was the agency’s exercise of discretion, not the statute, that determined what disclosures were prohibited. 

• Civil Litigation
• Confidentiality
• Government Employers and Employees
• Whistleblowers