North Carolina, like many states, recognizes that employees owe a certain level of duty to their employers. However, the North Carolina Supreme Court has specifically rejected any independent liability for breaching such duty.

These days, employees and their attorneys often go to great lengths to intimidate employers. One way to do that is to file a huge lawsuit—one that takes up pages and pages, and includes a laundry list of allegations ... Before you panic, call your attorneys

Q. We're cleaning up our personnel files and updating emergency contact information. Some employees don't want to provide their contact information. Is it legal for us to require them to give it to us?

Encouraged by a victory in Polk County Circuit Court, Lakeland resident and public-records gadfly Joel Chandler submitted public records requests to the state’s 67 school districts demanding the names, addresses, ages and telephone numbers of every person covered by the districts’ health insurance plans.

You may not realize it, but your organization may be contributing to identity theft by failing to safeguard personal information such as employees’ names, addresses, birth dates and Social Security numbers. Any one of those breaches could violate the North Carolina Identity Theft Protection Act.

Both the ADA and the FMLA have strict requirements for how employers must handle employee’s confidential medical information. HR professionals must know these rules to comply with both laws—and to avoid expensive legal liability for failing to do so. Here are the details you need.

Two former Neiman Marcus loss prevention investigators who were fired from Neiman Marcus in October 2007 for having sex on the job are suing the company for illegally videotaping them.

Q. Recently, an employee left our company to join a competitor. When we took a look at his computer, we found deleted e-mails and files indicating he downloaded some valuable information about our customers. We suspect he transferred it to our competitor. He was an at-will employee and we had no employment agreement with him. Is there anything we can do about this?

Q. We just hired a salesperson from a competitor. We warned her not to take proprietary information from her former employer, but she says what is on her personal laptop is her information. Is there any risk for us from that laptop?

Many of the millions who post information online never think a potential employer might read what they post. Meanwhile, employers believe that if the information is available online for the viewing, they have an obligation to look. However, several laws may restrict how you conduct the search or how you use the information.

Employees may think of “their” desks as their own private domains—safe places to keep their own things literally under lock and key. However, employers do have the right to open that locked drawer. When the desk is in an open area shared with other employees, the employee with the key doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Q. We discovered that an employee has posted false, profane statements about our company and managers on his Facebook page. What can we do? ...

Q. As an employer, what can I do to avoid unauthorized disclosure of sensitive company information when an employee departs?

When you conduct an internal investigation, other employees involved in the investigation are going to figure out what the allegations are. But you don’t have to worry about a defamation lawsuit following the investigation if you strive to keep the matter confidential ...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed a bill that would have allowed California farm workers to seek union representation using a card-check system that was opposed by the farming industry. Although the California Assembly and Senate passed the legislation after a summer of wrangling over details, Schwarzenegger spiked the bill ...