Holiday parties are an opportunity for employers to show their appreciation to employees for their work over the course of the year and they create a nice tradition that can enhance employee morale. But among the mirth and good cheer can lurk an HR professional’s nightmare. Yeah, we’ve heard the stories. So here are some tips for planning company social events any time of the year.

Consumer Trends Pulling Auto Manufacture and Sales Into the Future—an article by The Scali Law Firm attorneys Chris Scali and Melanie Joo—was featured in the Los Angeles Business Journal’s 2016 Automotive Review.

Today the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a nationwide injunction that blocks the Department of Labor’s new minimum salary requirements for the federal white collar overtime exemptions, which were set to take effect December 1, 2016. The Court held that the DOL’s new salary rules are contrary to legislative intent and that the DOL exceeded its authority with respect to the new minimum salary requirements, as well as the future automatic adjustments.

Next week, a Texas federal court is expected to rule on whether the U.S. Department of Labor’s new overtime rules will take effect as scheduled on Dec. 1, 2016. These new rules, which raise the minimum salary requirements for the Executive, Administrative and Professional exemptions to $913 per week ($47,476 annually) and set automatic future adjustments, have been challenged as unlawful by a number of states.

Earlier this year we notified you about the new expanded union persuader rule issued by the U.S. Department of Labor this past spring. On Wednesday a Texas federal judge permanently blocked the DOL’s enforcement of these expansions to the persuader rule, finding that the rule is unlawful.

The Northern California Record interviewed Scali Law Firm founder and managing partner, Christian Scali, about this ruling from California's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Their decision in Gonzales v. CarMax reversed a district court’s summary judgment in favor of CarMax Auto Superstores LLC and remanded with instructions to enter summary judgment for plaintiff Travis Gonzales. Gonzalez filed the lawsuit against CarMax under the Consumer Legal Remedies Act and Unfair Competition Law.

Since 2004, the Paid Family Leave program has provided monetary benefits to employees who have to temporarily miss work to care for a sick family member or to bond with a new child. This program is funded through employee payroll deductions into the State Disability Insurance fund. Earlier this year, the Governor signed into law a bill that will take effect January of 2018 to increase these benefits.

Final pay checks have special protections under California law, and therefore, employers must be very careful in calculating and issuing them. We often encounter situations in which an employer wishes to make deductions from an employee’s final paycheck for business losses, such as unreturned uniforms or equipment.