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Postsecondary Education & Human Resources
Dow Lohnes offers our clients a coordinated human resources practice, using an integrated approach to compensation, benefits and employment-related matters. We serve as consultants, negotiators, facilitators and litigators in all matters affecting the employment relationship, including the hiring, rewarding, disciplining and termination of employees. We assist our clients in the design, implementation and administration of successful and innovative programs to hire and retain top-quality personnel, both executives and rank and file employees, and also advise clients with respect to the termination of employees who do not meet expected standards of performance. We regularly are involved in designing plans and programs to compensate and reward employees, including retirement, incentive and health care programs, and work extensively in the design and administration of compensation and stock-based programs.
We also advise on the design, operation and administration of various qualified, non qualified, welfare and incentive plans provided to workers. Our lawyers offer legal analysis as to alternative interpretations of those arrangements, as well as possible modifications that might permit the client to achieve its desired results, including tax qualified retirement plans, non qualified supplemental retirement plans and incentive plans, health and welfare plans, and fringe benefit plans.
Dow, Lohnes lawyers advise on the establishment of the employment relationship, advising clients on the proper classification of a worker as employee or independent contractor, and negotiating employment or consulting agreements. We also assist with the termination of employment through the negotiation or creation of individual or group severance arrangements or early retirement programs. In addition to those matters directly affecting the employment relationship, we advise clients on a variety of related matters, including initial public offerings, management buyouts, and fiduciary and tax aspects of tax qualified plan investment decisions. We also negotiate managed care contracts and design and evaluate responses to and requests for proposals involving payroll systems and the administration of employee benefit plans.
Special areas of expertise include executive employment contracts, addressing such issues as alternative forms of compensation, confidentiality, covenants not to compete and ownership and use of work product; termination agreements, including reductions in force, individual inducements/agreements to resign or retire and settlement and resolution of potential employment actions as part of a comprehensive release of claims; employment issues arising out of transfers of ownership, including successorship, reductions in force and contract survival/termination; advice on developments in labor and employment laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act; discrimination actions (race, sex, age, disability, and other protected classes) and charges before administrative agencies; design of drug and alcohol abuse policies and testing programs; collective bargaining negotiations; arbitration proceedings; drafting and reviewing employee handbooks and personnel policies; defense of wrongful discharge suits or related challenges to employment termination; affirmative action plans; wage and hour and equal employment audits; and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) audits (i.e., affirmative action and related issues).
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Events
December 5-7, 2007:
1st Annual Higher Education Investment Conference: Seeing the Future in the Age of Private Equity & Public Ethics
Publications
March 13, 2007:
Salon.com Article: The suicide test
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