With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting families and relationships across the country, now more than ever, working through the realities of divorce can be incredibly challenging.  In addition to the multitude of difficult decisions to be made, families are forced to determine how best to proceed when economic and social norms have been turned upside down. 

Due to the challenges facing us in these unprecedented times, individuals considering or going through a divorce should keep in mind several factors.  In this article, various topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic will be explored from the different perspectives of New Jersey family law attorneys from Phillips Nizer and wealth advisors from Mariner Wealth Adivsors.

Phillips Nizer Managing Partner Marc Landis weighs in on challenges facing the legal industry during Managing Partners Roundtable at the NYSBA's annual meeting.

This article examines how to advise wealthy families and the nonprofits they support to adjust the strategy in the new environment for philanthropy. 

The article addresses some of the key questions raised by California’s new privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which took effect on January 1, 2020, including what is covered by and who must comply with the new law and how it compare with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) implemented in May 2018.

Stolen Corporate Funds and how co-ops and condo boards can prevent theft - and immediate steps when fraud or criminal activity is suspected - Lisa Radetsky, Real Estate Co-Chair and Ilene Jaroslaw, White Collar Chair

Phillips Nizer partner Eileen Millett was quoted in Law360's article, "NY Climate Legislation Would Stress Building, Power Sectors."

The #MeToo era has prompted employers across the country to review their internal mechanisms for screening and investigating complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace. Federal, state, and local laws—and more recently, cultural mandates—require companies to implement prophylactic and remedial procedures to address or mitigate sexual misconduct.

Those procedures often require in-house counsel to participate in crafting defensible measures to address employee complaints, perhaps with the assumption that involvement by counsel will provide a cloak of privilege surrounding internal investigations. However, a recent decision from the Southern District of New York, Barbini v. First Niagara Bank, No. 16-cv-7887, highlights the challenges companies can face in protecting attorney-client privilege when defending claims that arise from or turn in some way upon internal investigations involving in-house counsel.

Authored by Patrick Burke, Chair, Data Technology & Cybersecurity, and Anne-Sophie Hutteau-Hiltzer, referendare with our Data Technology & Cybersecurity, German and Corporate & Business Law Practices

Excerpt:

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Daniel Therrien, recently announced his intention to obligate companies to obtain Canadians’ consent before an organization engaged in commercial activities may legally transfer their personal information across the border for processing, including to the United States. Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) released a consultation paper on April 9, 2019 communicating this proposed change of direction, and calling for stakeholders’ commentary by June 4, 2019 (April 9, 2019 OPC Consultation on Transborder Data Flows). It is unclear at present whether the anticipated consent requirement will be applied to transborder transfer for processing of employees’ personal information by employers, which until now has not explicitly been required.

This is a significant turnabout for Canada. Consent for such transfers is not explicitly required under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Document Act, S.C. 2000, c.5 (Can.) (PIPEDA). Until now, the OPC did not require the consent of consumers or other “data subjects” for transborder transfers of personal information for processing. Instead, it applied an “accountability principle” that was satisfied if a Canadian-based entity informed data subjects of transborder transfers in its posted privacy policy and remained legally accountable for the protection of personal data sent abroad to a third party for processing. Principle 4.1.3 of schedule 1 of PIPEDA provides as follow: “An organization is responsible for personal information in its possession or custody including information that has been transferred to a third-party for processing. The organization shall use contractual or other means to provide a comparable level of protection while the information is being processed by a third party.”

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Thomas Jackson, partner at Phillips Nizer LLP, explains that the industry’s extraordinarily rich data market brings with it a much higher risk of identity theft. This is particularly the case, he says, “when the breach involves dates of birth, passport numbers, travel itineraries, and other kinds of discrete data that one would not expect to see in a typical payment system.” 

The authors Patrick J. Burke and Alisha L. McCarthy discuss a recent Illinois Supreme Court ruling, which is a boost to plaintiffs in Biometric Information Privacy Act lawsuits, and carries a cautionary note for companies that collect biometric information from consumers or employees in Illinois.

Customers of QuadrigaCX, the Canadian virtual currency exchange, have been left in limbo without access to their funds after it was reported the company's founder and CEO Gerald Cotton had passed away leaving no other company executive with the private keys to their accounts.

The purpose of this article is to describe and explain the likely approach that a New York court will take with respect to recognizing the status of fiduciaries appointed under the laws of non-US jurisdictions and the extent to which a New York court will accept and enforce judgments concerning the inheritance of property in accordance with the laws of non-US jurisdictions. We first consider how New York’s approach to these issues must be viewed in the context of New York’s position as a state of the USA. We next consider the ways in which a New York court may assert jurisdiction over the inheritance of property of a decedent who was not domiciled in New York at the time of their death. We then consider the way in which the New York personal property of a foreign decedent may be distributed without court intervention and finally proceed to consider the rules for the administration of the New York property of a foreign decedent where court intervention is necessary and how such property may be distributed, especially when it passes to foreign beneficiaries.

Last week, in Cowpasture River Preservation Association v. Forest Service a panel of the 4th Fourth Circuit rejected the U.S. Forest Service approval of a pipeline development that would have crossed 21 miles of national forest land, and the Appalachian National Scenic Trial...more

In the course of the development of the common law, with its unique dependence on a sometimes unholy alliance between enacted and judge-made law, curiosities will arise. Retailers, auction houses and others with consumer websites that support physical sales facilities have seen this recently, as lawyers around the country have driven in fifth gear to their nearest federal courthouses to file lawsuits on behalf of the visually impaired, claiming that those websites exclude the visually impaired from equal access in violation of federal law.

Excerpt:

"What attracted so much ire in response to the Cambridge Analytica episode was not only that collected personal data of as many as 87m Facebook users in the US but also the nature of the data that was collected and how it was used.

The data was harvested using a personality test that, unbeknown to the Facebook users who took the test, not only gave a third-party access to their personal information but also the personal information of their friends for use in a political campaign."

Website accessibility is a hot topic right now which means you should be checking if your website is compliant with Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If your website is not accessible to individuals with disabilities, you might get slapped with an unwanted and expensive lawsuit.

This is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in the New York International Law Practicum (Spring 2014).

With emerging technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), breaking into the mainstream, already antique laws must rise to the occasion.

Most of the material appeared originally in an article in the October 2009 edition of Estate Planning magazine, a publication of Thomson Reuters.  The article has been updated from time to time since its original publication but the article does not purport to give legal advice about the laws and taxes of any of the jurisdictions discussed in the article.  Details about such laws should be reviewed with legal counsel competent to give advice about the laws of relevant jurisdictions before taking action in any way reliant on the information contained herein.

The EU Succession Regulation represents perhaps the most ambitious and comprehensive effort to date to regularize the rules about choice of law that apply to the succession of decedents' estates in any part of the world. The Article highlights the significance of the Regulation not only in planning for U.S. persons who live in the European Union, but also in planning for U.S. persons who live outside the European Union but who own property there. The Article also discusses the reception that a choice of law made under the Regulation may be expected to receive in New York State–one of the most prominent jurisdictions of the United States where issues of cross-border succession planning constantly arise and for which the Regulation may be especially relevant.