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Across The Bar Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Laura Brounstein & Peter Rahbar
Employment attorney Peter Rahbar and veteran journalist Laura Brounstein's weekly conversation about how the news is affecting the laws that govern our daily work and personal life. We cover negotiation, workplace privacy, pop culture and more!
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- 3 days ago1h 7m
Across the Bar Podcast, Episode 67 - Adam Rapoport on Office Lunch Rules, the Hyrox Sh*tshow, Workers Demanding GLP-1 Coverage and Beware of the CFDA CEO
Liz Baker Plosser is back in the co-host seat this week and we brought in Adam Rapoport to talk about the do's and don'ts of office lunches. Bring your own bowl. Clean the dishes. Do not, under any circumstances, microwave fish or crack a hard-boiled egg within smelling distance of another human. Adam's got the full rulebook, and Peter's ready to write it into every employee handbook in America.Then we get into the legal stuff: what a manager should do when an employee's writing reeks of AI (spoiler — the fix doesn't require ever saying the letters "A" and "I"), the Hyrox Beijing scandal that turned an elite athlete's worst day into an international controversy with real workplace-safety implications, and the growing list of employers getting called out for what they owe their people — Cigna employees petitioning to get GLP-1 coverage reinstated, and Amazon quietly tripling its number of warehouse workers on food stamps while profits climb. We close it out with the CFDA president's very physical, very filmed confrontation with protesters at a fashion show — and what happens to an executive's career when there's no security team standing between him and a bad decision.Please watch or listen, share and subscribe to the Across the Bar Podcast!
- 1 weeks ago56 min
Across the Bar Podcast, Episode 66 - Job Hopping Is Dead, Best Dressed Lawyers, LinkedIn's Dating Problem & the $700M Hyrox Deal
This week, Peter and guest co-host Liz Baker Plosser are back from summer and diving straight into the work issues confronting everyone as they return to the office. They start with a reader comment that hit a nerve: workplace acronyms and AI-speak have gotten so bad people are starting to sound like robots in their own performance reviews. Peter gives his advice on how AI should (and shouldn't) touch your writing, and it might be a little blunt. From there, they unpack the new jobs report and the strange new normal it reveals: people are staying put, wages aren't moving, and the old stigma around job hopping — or not job hopping — has basically disintegrated.Then, Business Insider's "best dressed lawyers" list gets the skewering it deserves, before Peter breaks down Mayor Mamdani's brand-new Office of Worker Power and why he thinks it's a political play dressed up as policy. Liz and Peter also settle the debate on whether LinkedIn has quietly turned into a dating app (the Wall Street Journal seems to think so; Peter thinks everyone should log off), and close out with Hyrox's jump from scrappy hybrid fitness race to $700 million private equity darling — plus where companies cross the line pushing employees into team workouts.Please watch, subscribe, comment on and share this week's episode of The Across the Bar Podcast!
- 2 weeks ago55 min
Across the Bar Podcast, Episode 65 - Should Employers Cover Menopause Benefits, Uber Blames Its Employees and Anna Wintour Gets Overruled
Should employers be covering menopause benefits? Peter and guest co-host Liz Plosser (Best Case Scenario) take on a listener's question this week — and it opens up a bigger conversation about the legal tightrope employers walk when choosing employee benefits, plus the real fear a lot of women have about whether even asking for support quietly marks them as a liability. Also, Liz's tips on how to survive the current estrogen patch shortage happening right now.From there the episode swings hard — a business school for eight-year-olds, EY paying employees up to $25K to be more human in the age of AI slop, and the great "cool boss" debate, which Peter is fairly convinced misses the point entirely. Employees don't care if you chug a beer standing on your head; they care if you actually have their back.Then things get heavier. The Met Gala trustees overrule Anna Wintour on John Galliano as this year's honoree, and it becomes a case study in what happens when nobody around a powerful person is willing to push back. The Good Good Golf CEO is gone after that Callaway ad. And Uber's layoff memo manages to make 3,300 job cuts sound like something employees asked for — which Peter is not going to let slide.
- 3 weeks ago50 min
Across the Bar Podcast, Episode 64 - Quiet Vacationing, Slack Spying & Disney's Family "Un"-Friendly Health Insurance Change
Summer's basically over, and everyone's dealing with it differently — some people are faking Wi-Fi outages to steal one more day off, while Peter's out here treating a plane's spotty signal as a built-in excuse to actually get work done. That tension — who owes their employer visibility into their time, and who's allowed to go quiet — ends up running through the whole episode. It's there in the conversation about Slack, where companies are now feeding entire channels into AI so nothing stays private, "side-slacking" during meetings has become its own art form, and Peter's blunt reminder is that none of it — Slack, iMessage, Zoom chat — comes with any real expectation of privacy. Even your emoji reactions aren't safe; used the wrong way, they can become evidence in a harassment case.That same question of who gets to decide what's disclosed and what isn't shows up again with the Wall Street Journal's decision to quietly bless AI-written op-eds — including one from a billionaire who compared using AI to using a calculator — a stance that puts the Journal sharply at odds with outlets that have banned the tools outright. And it's there in two harder stories: Disney's new policy stripping spousal health coverage from employees whose spouses have insurance of their own, which Peter calls what it is — a pay cut dressed up as cost-cutting, and a strange look for a company that's built its whole brand on family — and the Neutrogena backlash following Hayden Panettiere's death, where old comments about a "morality clause" invoked over her postpartum depression disclosure are forcing a real reckoning about what brands owe the people who represent them.Guest co-host Liz Baker Plosser fills in for Laura this week, and the two also get into an $18 billion Meta settlement over kids and teens on social media, plus heroes and zeros closing out with a shared tribute to Dolly Parton.
- Aug 21, 202647 min
Across the Bar Podcast, Episode 63 - The Decoy Plane, GLP-1s at Work, Navigating the Office Gym, and the Death of Board Diversity
Laura is on a well-earned summer break, so Peter's joined by special guest co-host Liz Plosser, former editor-in-chief of Women's Health and the voice behind the wellness Substack Best Case Scenario. First up, the GLP-1 conversation nobody knows how to have at work — commenting on a colleague's weight loss feels harmless until it isn't, and HR is starting to notice. Then, the reader question of the summer: is it actually okay to quit if you have been left on the "decoy plane"? Peter and Liz dig into the lates Presidential story and whether managers are responsible for the safety of their employees, plus Liz's own wild Air Force Two detour involving a cracked windshield and a very unglamorous curbside drop-off at the Delta terminal. From there, the etiquette of writing your own goodbye message (hint: nobody wants your ten-page victory lap), whether LinkedIn's new "AI slop" flag will actually clean up your feed, and a sobering look at the 61 S&P 100 companies that have quietly dropped board diversity criteria altogether. Liz also settles the office gym debate once and for all — yes, you should go, and yes, it's fine to say hi to your CEO at the water fountain. Subscribe to Best Case Scenario: https://lizplosser.substack.com
- Aug 7, 202630 min
Across the Bar Podcast, Episode 62 - Snowplow Parents Go Corporate, Tenure Under Siege, AI Comes for HR, and LinkedIn's Top Colleges List
Peter's joining from Sardinia this week, which means the vibe is loose but the topics are not. First up: Gen-Z parents have entered the chat at work, showing up to job interviews and calling managers to contest their kid's firing. Peter and Laura's rule is simple — unless your child is in a literal coma, hang up the phone. From there, we turn to HR, a department that's had a rough couple of years and is now watching AI quietly take over its job. Peter, of all people, makes the case that this isn't entirely bad news — right before explaining exactly how it goes horribly wrong. Then: tenure, the thing every professor was told was untouchable, turns out to be very touchable. A West Point professor challenges a gag rule and wins; a tenured economics professor at the New School gets laid off anyway, and the whole academic world is having a small crisis about what "lifetime job security" actually means. We close things out with LinkedIn's new ranking of top colleges for career success — Princeton's #1, feelings were had about alma maters — and a real conversation about whether the rankings measure anything a 17-year-old should actually care about.
- Jul 31, 202631 min
Across the Bar Podcast, Episode 61 - Fired for a Ketamine Confession, Caught Kissing at Wachtell, and Why Gen Z Is Crying at Work
A Netflix production exec named is suing after getting fired following a corporate retreat where he disclosed medically supervised ketamine treatment for depression during a trust exercise — and also, per Netflix, drank a Guinness standing on his head. Peter and Laura dig into where the actual legal exposure sits: if the termination was really about the medical disclosure, Netflix has a problem; if it was the sum total of "behavior unbecoming of an executive," that's a different story entirely — and a reminder that company policy travels with you to every offsite, happy hour, and business trip.Then: a Wachtell Lipton partner and associate caught mid-makeout on a Bryant Park bench by a stranger with a camera, nine blocks from their office. He's married, she has a partner, and he's a partner at the firm to her associate — a combination that got him left off the six-lawyer defection to Gibson Dunn and landed him on administrative leave instead. Peter on why judgment, not just skill, is what firms actually pay for.Finally, the real conversation: a Fortune piece on Gen Z workers napping in movie theaters and crying in Aritzia fitting rooms to cope with workplace stress. Peter and Laura get into why this generation is hitting a harder wall than the ones before it — less in-person conflict practice growing up, employers openly talking about replacing them with AI, and a job market that made the entry-level seat itself feel like the finish line
- Jul 25, 202632 min
Across the Bar Podcast, Episode 60 - Insider Trading From the Teleprompter, IRS Chief's Spy Games & Planning a Retreat People Don't Dread
This week we start in the West Wing, where the man responsible for scrolling President Trump's speeches across the teleprompter turned out to have a lucrative side gig: allegedly trading on Kalshi based on what he already knew the President was about to say. It's the kind of insider trading story that writes itself — except it's paired with something arguably worse, reports that early access to the President's Truth Social posts is being sold to companies for somewhere around $100–200K a pop. We get into why any regulated firm even considering paying for that access should think hard about what a state attorney general, or a very different administration two years from now, might make of it.From there we head to the EEOC, which just voted 2-1 to scrap the EEO-1 reporting requirements that have quietly tracked workplace demographics for six decades — and is doing it on a 30-day comment period instead of the usual 60. We talk about what it means when the agency in charge of equal employment opportunity stops measuring who's actually employed at companies.Then there's Frank Bisignano, the head of the IRS, who — according to a Wall Street Journal report — allegedly used JPMorgan's own security apparatus to keep tabs on his internal rivals during his time there. We break down why that story matters well beyond his old job, and the basic access controls every company, not just megabanks, should have in place.We close things out with something a little less felonious: how to actually plan a corporate retreat people want to attend instead of one they've been dreading for weeks — including why the boss should probably stay out of the planning committee.
About Across The Bar Podcast
Employment attorney Peter Rahbar and veteran journalist Laura Brounstein's weekly conversation about how the news is affecting the laws that govern our daily work and personal life. We cover negotiation, workplace privacy, pop culture and more!
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