Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

The results are in: attorneys are filing more employment law cases in court.  Indeed, year-end reporting from legal databases like LexMachina confirm that the pace of filing new employment discrimination cases reached its highest level in 2025, surpassing 20,000 new filings nationwide.  Though overtime and minimum wage lawsuits under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have continued to decline since 2015, discrimination cases under laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act are on the rise.

The California Supreme Court is poised to address a fundamental question in employment law: Can an arbitration agreement be enforced when its operative terms are illegible?

The United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”), does not have a safety standard specifically addressing extreme weather. Instead, OSHA relies on the General Duty Clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act to address identified hazards to workers in extreme weather. The General Duty Clause requires employers to provide employees “a place of employment which [is] free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.”

Hunton’s OSHA lawyers will provide an update on the status of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) under the Trump administration. The discussion will include the status of current rulemaking, DOGE’s impact on OSHA operations, enforcement trends, and state plan developments.