Four Indonesian men who allege they were abused and forced to work on ships in Bumble Bee’s supply chain can continue pursuing their lawsuit against the company, judge rules

A San Diego federal judge ruled Friday that despite her mistake in a previous ruling last year, a lawsuit by four Indonesian fishers alleging human trafficking and forced labor violations against San Diego-based canned tuna giant Bumble Bee Seafoods can continue toward trial and will not be dismissed.

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“This important decision affirms that our clients — Indonesian men who were looking for good jobs to build a future, and instead say they were trapped and isolated at sea — have every right to pursue their claims against Bumble Bee here in the United States,” Agnieszka Fryszman, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “We thank the Court for this thoughtful ruling and look forward to advancing our clients’ pursuit of justice.”

A Delaware federal jury has cleared TVision Insights Inc. from claims by The Nielsen Co. that it infringed a patent covering audio recognition software with its products for getting data on TV audiences.

Jurors on Thursday returned a verdict in favor of TVision after both parties rested Wednesday in the trial that kicked off on Monday. The jury denied Nielsen’s claims that its competitor infringed Claim 8 of the patent, which covers a technology and method for using “signatures” to identify content in audio streams for measuring television consumption habits.

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TVision is represented by Nathan R. Hoeschen, Virginia K. Lynch and Andrew E. Russell of Shaw Keller LLP, Jason Xu and Eric C. Cohen of Rimôn Law PC, Benjamin D. Brown, Richard A. Koffman and Daniel McCuaig of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and Steig D. Olson, Sami H. Rashid, Patrick D. Curran and Adam B. Wolfson of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP.

The D.C. Attorney General’s Office reached $1.4 million in settlements on Friday with Avenue5 Residential LLC and Bell Partners for claims that they used RealPage’s software to inflate rental rates.

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Washington, D.C., is represented by Brian L. Schwalb, Will Stephens, Adam Gitlin, Mehreen Imtiaz and Ashley Walters of the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, and Emmy L. Levens, Robert A. Braun, Alison S. Deich, Amanda K. Chuzi, Zachary Krowitz, Alexander J. Noronha and Aaron J. Marks of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

A group of farmers have asked a North Carolina federal judge to preliminarily approve an $85 million settlement with Corteva Inc. to resolve antitrust claims that the company used loyalty rebate programs to artificially extend their patent monopolies over certain pesticides.

The unopposed multidistrict litigation deal is only with Corteva and does not cover a second defendant in the proposed class action, Syngenta Corp., in a suit that originally sought more than $2 billion in total damages.

“The recovery is significant, approximately 10% of the total damages plaintiffs’ expert calculated were caused by Corteva’s alleged misconduct and far more than the zero damages argued by Corteva,” the motion said. “In light of the nature and complexity of the litigation, the settlement agreement warrants preliminary approval.”

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The farmers are seeking to preliminarily approve a settlement a class of about 100,000 and appoint attorneys form Pinto Coates Kyre & Bowers PLLC, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Korein Tillery LLC, Lowey Dannenberg PC and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP as settlement class counsel, and appoint the MDL named plaintiffs as class representatives.

In the coming months, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s chief will wield her newly centralized powers to continue zeroing in on employers’ diversity, equity and inclusion practices and investigating antisemitism allegations on college campuses, attorneys said.

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Demise of Reporting Regime

Beyond these enforcement hot spots, the agency is poised to eliminate its decades-old requirements mandating that large employers report their workplace demographics. The EEOC sent a proposal to the White House on May 14 to halt the collection of EEO-1 reports, as well as other data surveys.

The agency’s EEO-1 reports require private employers with 100 or more employees, or federal contractors with over 50 workers, to submit workforce demographic data by job category and sex and race or ethnicity. Its EEO-3, EEO-4 and EEO-5 data collections call for similar information from unions, state and local governments and public schools.

The commission has said in the past that the information gathered is used for enforcement and research, as well as companies’ self-assessments. It’s also posted publicly in aggregate form, giving outside groups a sense of where problems persist.

The EEOC hasn’t formally given its rationale for the walk-back, but in a statement regarding the EEO-1data collection, Lucas indicated she had concerns that the demographic reports may prompt companies to discriminate in an attempt to correct for disparities surfaced by the data.

The proposal sent to the White House is still under review, but experts have told Law360 they expect it to eventually clear.

Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC partner Joseph M. Sellers, founder and co-chair of the worker-side firm’s civil rights and employment practice, told Law360 the plan represents another example of how the agency’s current leadership is radically departing from past practices.

The data from the EEO-1s and other surveys provides a crucial pathway to discern patterns of unlawful workplace conduct, he said.

“It’s going to deprive the commission of a critical enforcement tool,” Sellers said. “Relying almost exclusively on charges is an enormous setback to the capacity of the commission.”

Summary by Bloomberg AI

• The EEOC’s proposal to revoke requirements for employers to report race and sex data puts companies in uncharted territory, forcing them to consider if and how they can continue such practices.
• Companies may still be required to gather information based on separate agency guidelines and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act responsibilities, labor and employment attorneys said.
• Maintaining data found in EEO-1 reports can be helpful for employers to ensure they’re not engaging in discriminatory practices and to defend themselves against charges, according to attorneys.

The EEOC’s pending proposal to revoke longstanding requirements for employers to report race and sex data for their workforce puts companies in uncharted territory, forcing them to consider if and how they can continue such practices.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission submitted a plan in May to the White House to rescindEEO-1 and other employer data collection forms, but further details aren’t yet published.

Without the agency’s data collection, companies may still be required to gather information based on separate agency guidelines and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act responsibilities, labor and employment attorneys said. Despite scrutiny from the Trump administration over use of EEO-1data, employers may still see good reasons to collect it.

“I don’t think sticking your head in the sand and being blind to the data is going to go over well,” said Christine Webber, a partner at plaintiff-side firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

The EEO-1 forms require private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees to submit data by sex, race or ethnicity, and job category.

The EEOC also created joint Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures in 1978 with four other federal agencies to provide guidance for employers on whether their hiring tests and selection procedures were lawful under Title VII.

The guidelines state employers should maintain records disclosing the impact its selection procedures have upon employment opportunities for people identifiable by race, sex, or ethnic group. The records are to be maintained in a way that is consistent with EEO-1 forms, the guidelines said.

The guidelines require companies continue to maintain the data even without submitting EEO-1 forms, several employment attorneys said.

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Regardless of requirements, maintaining data found in EEO-1 reports can be helpful for employers to ensure they’re not engaging in discriminatory practices and to defend themselves against charges, Webber said.

If companies don’t maintain that data, it will make litigation more expensive for both sides, but attorneys representing workers will still be able to access other data to prove their cases through other forms or comparisons with public reports, she said.

Christina McGlosson, Special Counsel: Dodd-Frank Whistleblower Practice, has been appointed to World Jurist Association as Co-General Counsel of North America and a member of its board of directors.

In this role, Christina will assist the World Jurist Association and member countries on initiatives that promote and comply with global rules of law to help foster ethical and social responsibility, while reducing corruption and fraud.

World Jurist Association is a global platform built on integrity, independence, and institutional leadership. Since 1963, the World Jurist Association has brought together judges, lawyers, academics, and legal professionals from around the world to strengthen the rule of law through dialogue, cooperation, and shared principles.

A steep decline in whistleblower rewards indicates two US agencies are not upholding a legal mandate to incentivise reports of financial wrongdoing, lawyers told GIR.

The Securities and Exchange Commission denied more than 85% of claims submitted through its whistleblower rewards programme last year, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has denied more awards halfway through 2026 than it has in any of the previous five full years, according to a review of data by GIR.

Former agency lawyers view the denials, many of which have occurred contrary to the agencies’ established processes, as part of President Donald Trump’s administration’s shift of priorities to disfavour whistleblowers.

Meanwhile, an SEC decision to cut payout amounts shows that the administration is deprioritising incentives for people to come forward with evidence of financial misconduct, lawyers said.

“Protecting and supporting whistleblowers does not seem to be a priority of the leadership of either agency,” said Christina McGlosson, a former CFTC and SEC official now at Cohen & Milstein in Washington, DC. “And that’s disturbing.”

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“Carryover” to CFTC

On the CFTC side, denials are already higher in early June than any full year dating back to 2020.

The trend of denials seems to be a “carryover” from the SEC’s shifting priorities, said McGlosson of Cohen & Milstein.

McGlosson, who served in the CFTC’s enforcement division from 2017 to 2021 and as acting director of its whistleblower office from 2023 to 2024, noted that the agency had paid out nearly $200 million to a whistleblower in 2021. At the time, she said, it was the largest whistleblower reward under Dodd-Frank, only surpassed by a $279 million SEC award in 2023, she said.

The CFTC’s programme has been seen as a success story overall – so much so that it has occasionally faced funding difficulties, McGlosson said, pointing to a 2023 statement by US Senator Chuck Grassley warning that CFTC’s programme should not become a “victim of its own success”.

Now, she said, the number of denials has also corresponded with a large backlog in cases, the origin of which she called an “enigma”.

“Even older awards somehow are not being processed, and given the CFTC’s prior successes in this area, I fail to understand why that is,” she said.

The number of denials isn’t because of line-level staff, McGlosson said, instead calling it a more “systematic” issue.

“I supervised and hired many of the attorneys in that office, and I know those attorneys are exceptional,” she said. “No one can understand why nothing’s moving through the whistleblower office.”

The quarterly, nondiscretionary bonuses an employer gave to eligible employees already contemplated overtime pay and therefore don’t trigger a recalculation of the workers’ regular rate of pay, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division said in one of four opinion letters it released.

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In a third letter, the DOL concluded that a worker’s voluntary time spent in transit during a meal break is not compensable under the FLSA.

A worker said that it takes between five and 10 minutes for employees to walk from the job site to the parking lot, leaving between 10 and 15 minutes in the meal break, according to the letter.

The worker argued that this discouraged employees from taking meal breaks away from the job site, the letter indicates.

However, the DOL said the meal break is long enough for employees to use on site and workers are relieved from their duties during the 30-minute break.

“While your letter indicates that you believe that 30 minutes is insufficient time for an off-site meal due to the physical characteristics of the employer’s facility … you nevertheless have the option to leave the employer’s premises during the meal period — which … is not required by the act,” the DOL said.

In a footnote, the DOL also pointed out that state and local wage and hour laws might include “rules and requirements that are more stringent than the FLSA.”

Rebecca Ojserkis, a worker-side attorney at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, said the letter leaves open the question of whether the department would reach the same conclusion in scenarios in which worksites might not be a safe place for employees to eat their lunches.

Ojserkis said that the DOL’s footnote “is a crucial flag.”

“For employers in many parts of the country, the FLSA requirements are not the floor; state or local mandates are,” Ojserkis said. “And even where the FLSA is the floor, employers should bear in mind what are best practices for worker productivity, satisfaction, and retention.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s green light of negligent hiring claims against freight brokers in highway crash cases and an adverse verdict against Uber in the sexual assault multidistrict litigation lead Law360’s Injury Law Roundup.

Here, we put Law360 readers on notice of what’s been trending recently in personal injury and medical malpractice news.

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NC Jury Finds Uber Liable for Driver Battery in Second Bellwether Trial

Uber was hit with its second consecutive loss in a bellwether trial held in North Carolina in multidistrict litigation over driver sex assaults, which experts said was a key outcome because it represented the lower end of the spectrum of assaults on passengers.

A federal jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, found on April 20 that an Uber driver committed battery against a passenger who accused him of grabbing her leg in 2019, and it awarded her $5,000 in damages, capping off a four-day bellwether trial against the ride-hailing giant. Earlier in the case, Uber was deemed a “common carrier” under North Carolina law with a nondelegable duty to safely transport passengers.

The MDL, which encompasses more than 3,100 cases, alleges Uber has known for more than a decade that drivers for its app preyed on and sexually assaulted vulnerable passengers and didn’t implement proper policies.

In the first bellwether trial, an Arizona federal jury in February determined that the driver was acting as the “apparent agent” of Uber, making the ride-hailing company liable for the assault, and awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages.

One plaintiffs attorney and former prosecutor praised the outcome of the North Carolina trial, telling Law360 that despite the modest damages award, it was a solid victory for the plaintiffs.

“It’s a superb outcome in terms of the finding of liability against Uber,” said Takisha Richardson of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, which is not handling any Uber MDL cases. “The biggest challenge in these cases is whether Uber is liable for the conduct of these drivers.”

The case is important, Richardson said, because it represented the lower end of the spectrum of sexual assaults and showed the company can still be held accountable, even if the driver’s misconduct is to a lesser degree than a rape.

“We all understand what a rape is, and that’s a very simple concept for the broad public to understand,” she said. “But something of this level — the touching of the inner thigh — that, too is a violation of one’s body and there’s a consequence for that.”

The cases are WHB 823 v. Uber Technologies Inc. et al., case number 3:25-cv-00737, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, and In re: Uber Technologies Inc. Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, case number 3:23-md-03084, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.