Los Angeles, California, Legal Blog

Athletes are often expected to trust their coaches, trainers, athletic departments, and team leadership. Those relationships can involve enormous power. Coaches may influence who starts, who travels, who receives playing time, who remains on scholarship, and who gets...

Employees are frequently told that if something inappropriate happens at work, they should report it. Tell a manager. Contact Human Resources. Use the company hotline. Put the complaint in writing. But what happens when the employee reports harassment and the...

At Makarem & Associates, we believe that every employee deserves to work in an environment free from racial discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Unfortunately, some employees find themselves subjected to discriminatory comments, unequal treatment, and...

Workplace sexual harassment is sometimes described in ways that make it sound relatively easy to identify: an inappropriate comment, an offensive joke, an unwanted invitation, or a coworker who refuses to respect boundaries. But some of the most serious workplace...

For many employees, harassment and discrimination do not happen as isolated events. Problems can overlap: an employee may face inappropriate conduct from a supervisor, experience retaliation after speaking up or requesting workplace protections, and later find that a...

Why Owner Harassment Creates a Reporting Trap Employees are often told to report sexual harassment to a supervisor or business owner. That advice becomes difficult when the person accused is the owner who controls schedules, discipline, pay, and continued employment....

Sometimes wage-and-hour problems do not take years to become visible. According to a proposed class action filed by Makarem & Associates against Wisconsin Great Northern Corporation and Great Northern Lamination, our client worked only a short period as a...

When an employee reports sexual harassment, the complaint itself should not become the beginning of a second workplace problem.  That is at the center of a lawsuit filed by Makarem & Associates against Bon Appetit Management Company. According to the complaint,...

Some workplace harassment cases build slowly, over months of comments that escalate a little at a time. Others turn physical almost immediately. Our client's case is the second kind. It's a hard one to read, but it's also exactly the kind of situation we want other...

At Makarem & Associates, we regularly speak with employees who know they are working hard but are not always sure whether they are being paid correctly for all of that work. Wage theft does not always look like an employer simply refusing to issue a paycheck. More...