Young Lawyers Section

This seminar helps legal professionals in the worker’s compensation field navigate complex cross over issues. The day begins with a comprehensive fact pattern followed by a breakdown of overlapping rules from the ADA, FMLA, OSHA, ERISA and state-specific acts like the Connecticut Paid Family and Medical Leave (CTPFMLA) and CFEPA. Sessions also address transitional duty obligations and alternative return-to-work solutions, closing with an interactive panel review of the opening hypothetical.

This session examines how bias operates today, not through overt exclusion, but inside the ordinary language of legal risk management, and inside the ordinary language of enforcement itself. Drawing on the presenter's consulting work advising corporate general counsel through the current wave of DEI-related enforcement, this session traces six years of employer decision-making, adoption, retrenchment, and litigation, from 2020 through mid-2026, and gives attorneys a working test for telling real legal risk apart from bias dressed as compliance, in either direction. The session uses live, contested litigation as its central case study, including a motion currently pending in federal court that itself rests on a compliance defense, to show how enforcement actions can turn on close legal analysis rather than assumption alone.

Generative artificial intelligence has moved from novelty to daily reality in the practice of law—and the ethical exposure has moved with it. Connecticut attorneys are drafting with it, researching with it, and running their front offices on it, often without a clear sense of where the Rules of Professional Conduct draw the lines. This program closes that gap. In two hours, attendees will learn how Connecticut’s existing ethics framework—anchored by Rule 1.1 and its technology-competence comment—applies to generative AI, what ABA Formal Opinion 512 requires, and how the national wave of AI-sanctions cases (including a Connecticut matter) translates into concrete duties. The program is deliberately practical: every segment ties to a specific Rule, every risk is paired with a workflow that manages it, and attendees leave with a sample firm AI policy, a prefiling verification checklist, and a vendor-neutral field guide to the tools lawyers are using.