A recent Appellate Division decision highlights a shift that law enforcement agencies—and public employers generally—need to fully understand: a positive cannabinoid test is no longer the basis for discipline. In In the Matter of Montavious Patten, a Jersey City police officer was terminated after testing positive for THC following a random drug test. Under older policies, that alone might have ended the analysis. The Court made clear that is no longer the case. Under CREAMMA

New Jersey police officer reviewing overtime paperwork A recent Law Division decision out of Passaic County raises some real concerns for anyone representing public employers or labor units in New Jersey. In Evans v. City of Paterson , the Court held that a collectively negotiated firefighter schedule and overtime provision violated the New Jersey Wage and Hour Law, even though that structure has been used for years across departments. The Court took the position that the sta

Government Employees and Elected Officials - is your private email activity on Gmail, Hotmail, and the like, safe from the Open Public...

Case update: NJ Police Officers and Cannabis Use In April of 2022, the NJ Attorney General issued a memo stating that police officers...

Why Hire an Attorney for a Real Estate Closing Blogging from the Office While New Jersey does not require that a buyer or homeowner...

AKA When can Major be Minor? New Jersey governmental employers are keenly aware of the difference between what the laws say is minor...

What can you do? This week the New Jersey Appellate Division issued a reported decision finding that the plaintiff in the case, Gilbert...

Seasoned practitioners of labor and employment law in New Jersey's governmental sector know that the big ticket item in the settlement of...

The Labor Employment Relations Association has honored Plosia Cohen LLC Managing Partner Jonathan F. Cohen with the prestigious 2020 LERA...

When Gov. Murphy signed into law the Earned Sick Leave Act on May 2, 2018, N.J.S.A. 34:11D-1 to -11, New Jersey joined nine other states...

I was pleased this afternoon to receive the New Jersey District Court's decision granting the Motion to Dismiss that our firm filed on...

When police officers are being investigated due to civilian complaints or for misconduct, an Internal Affairs ("IA") investigation is...

In the world of labor law, written and verbal reprimands have always held a murky place in the disciplinary scale. On the one hand, no...

Common sense dictates that a person can be identified through their initials, particularly when that person is a member of a discrete...

If you haven't been paying attention, the employment and labor law landscape has been rocked over the last several years by the renewed...

In a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Smiley et al. v. E.J. DuPont De Nemours and Co. (Oct. 7, 2016),...

Few developments in New Jersey public sector labor law created more widespread confusion among administrators (and consternation among...

On Friday, July 29, 2016, I had the privilege of speaking at Princeton University as part of the New Jersey Association of Professional...

The unfortunate events which have dominated the headlines over the last few days highlight the growing divisions in our country between...

In a published decision released on June 21, 2016, the New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division held that New Jersey's Chapter 78...