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Dealing with Human Resources challenges can be a frustrating, intimate business. Ideally, you want everyone who works at your company to get along well and to avoid drama. However, when things do go wrong, you need to have a recipe. You need a smart, efficient, legal system to manage HR issues and prevent them from recurring.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled that courier service FedEx misclassified approximately 2,300 California delivery drivers as contractors, instead of treating them as employees. FedEx required drivers as “independent contractors” to pay for their own trucks, along with fuel, insurance, maintenance, and other expenses, and did not pay workers compensation, vacation, sick leave, or retirement to workers.

Several major movie studios have reached an anti-trust settlement. A U.S. District Court judge in San Jose has approved a settlement involving some of the biggest players in the high tech engineering world.

California’s highest court is currently contemplating employer requirements for providing “suitable seating” to workers in the workplace. Here is what California employers need to know now:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has released new pregnancy employment guidelines, known as Enforcement Guidance: Pregnancy Discrimination and Related Issues. The document provides a summary of all major federal employment laws of the last few decades, including the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the context of pregnant workers.

The California Supreme Court ruled that Domino’s Pizza is not vicariously liable for the acts of one of its restaurant franchisees. The Court ruled that the act of franchising, or entering into a franchise relationship, did not constitute an agency-type relationship for the purpose of holding the parent company liable for the acts of an employee in a franchised store.

The agricultural guest worker program known as H-2A, which allows farmers to hire foreign agricultural migrant workers under specific visas, is not without controversy. Now one farming company in Georgia is paying $500,000 to settle claims that it discriminated against American workers in favor of Mexican migrant workers.

Energy bar makers Clif Bar and Kind are duking it out in federal court over trade dress infringement.

Cipriani Group, Inc. (CGI), parent of the eponymous New York City restaurants and importer of Italian food is suing Cipriani’s Pasta and Sauce, Inc. over alleged trademark infringement.

The U.S. Department of Labor is suing Bank of America for $2.2 million on behalf of 1,147 African-American job applicants who allegedly experienced discrimination.