The Inbox

With only two weeks to go until the Mayans’ end of days, what better way to spend your time than reading this week’s latest in Suits by Suits:

• A store manager for American Apparel has sued Dov Charney, the company’s CEO, accusing him of assault.  UPI reports that the manager alleges that Charney called him nasty names and tried to rub dirt on his face at an industry convention.  Lawyers can get a bad rap, but I doubt anything like that has ever happened at the ABA’s annual meeting.

• Yet another issue involving a clothing store manager: the L.A. Times says that the EEOC has found, after a three-year probe, that retailer Wet Seal discriminated against an African-American store manager.  According to the Times article, managers wanted the “Armani look” – thin, blue-eyed, and blond – and a high-level executive sent an e-mail stating that the dominance of African-American employees at the company was a “huge issue.” 
• The Texas Lawbook writes that Dallas-based Bickel & Brewer has been disqualified from representing a client in a business dispute on the ground that it offered $1 million to a former executive of the opposing party for inside information about the case.  The court that issued the disqualification order found that the executive took 2.3 gigabytes of secret information when he left, including confidential communications with Bickel’s opposing counsel.
• Is the SEC doing what it’s supposed to with the Dodd-Frank whistleblower bounty program, which (as we previously covered here and here) has resulted in only one award since its passage in 2010?  Private investigator John Powers writes in the Huffington Post that the SEC ignored his whistleblower tip, which he says he discovered in conducting due diligence for a corporate client.

• Confidentiality
• Discrimination
• The Inbox
• Whistleblowers