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Appellate Victory: First Circuit Affirms Summary Judgment in Favor of Automotive Dealership Client

11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Breazeale Sachse is proud to announce a significant appellate victory on behalf of an automotive dealership client in a complex personal injury action involving claims of negligence, products liability and redhibition.

In this case, the plaintiff claimed that after she engaged the parking brake, her vehicle unexpectedly rolled backward down a driveway, pinning her against an object and causing serious bodily injury. She filed suit alleging that the vehicle's parking brake system was defective and that our client who sold her the vehicle two years prior failed to identify the purported defect at the time of the sale or when performing a routine oil change and multi-point inspection a few months before the accident.

Following extensive discovery, our litigation team moved for summary judgment, arguing that, even with her expert’s opinion, the plaintiff could not establish essential elements of her claims—the existence of an actual defect in the vehicle or any negligent act on behalf of the dealership. The trial court agreed and granted our client’s Motion for Summary Judgment, dismissing plaintiff’s claims.

After substantial briefing and oral argument, the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal unanimously affirmed the lower court’s judgment. The First Circuit held that the plaintiff failed to produce competent evidence demonstrating the existence of any defect in the vehicle at any time. The court also found that speculative and conclusory expert opinions were insufficient to overcome our client’s Motion.

Given the severity of the accident and the injuries alleged, this case presented substantial exposure for our client despite the absence of any wrongdoing on its part. However, the First Circuit’s decision reinforces the principle that liability cannot be imposed absent competent evidence.

Breazeale Sachse’s litigation team included partner, Joseph J. Cefalu, III, and associates, Robert Moseley Schmidt and Charles C. Szeszycki. The firm's successful defense resulted in the complete dismissal of all claims against our client at the trial court and affirmation of that judgment on appeal. The decision serves as an important victory for automotive dealers and businesses facing defect and negligence-based claims unsupported by reliable evidence.

Update on Labor and Employment - New Orleans, September 10, 2026

10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Proposed Legislation Creates a New Licensure Pathway for International Physicians to Address Rural Workforce Shortages

02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Management Update - Volume 15, Issue 6

01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Weeding Out: What Marijuana Rescheduling Means for Employers

26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0800

It’s official. Medical marijuana has finally been rescheduled from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance. Well, sort of.

In late April 2026, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) issued a final order immediately rescheduling certain medical marijuana products to Schedule III, including (1) FDA-approved products containing marijuana, and (2) marijuana products regulated by a state medical marijuana license. All other forms of marijuana, including recreational marijuana, have not been rescheduled. However, an expedited administrative hearing process to consider the broader rescheduling of marijuana has been set for June 29, 2026.

So what exactly does this mean for employers? Here are a few answers to some burning questions surrounding marijuana rescheduling.

Q: When is rescheduling effective?

The order rescheduling certain medical marijuana was made effective upon its issuance in April 2026.

Q: What, if anything, do employers need to do to comply?

This is an open question, as the order leaves many questions unanswered.

Prior to the rescheduling, Federal disabilities law did not require employers to accommodate the use of medical marijuana because all forms of marijuana (medical and recreational) were illegal under Federal law. Now, however, at least according to the order, certain forms of medical marijuana are legal. Thus, the question is whether, and if so, to what extent, employers are required to accommodate the use of medical marijuana under Federal law. Unfortunately, the order does not clearly answer this. The order states nothing about employers, employees’ use of medical marijuana, or workplace accommodations for employees’ use of medical marijuana. Notably, no law permits intoxication on-the-job, even with rescheduling.

Q: What exactly is “medical marijuana regulated by a state medical marijuana license?”

Because marijuana has not been rescheduled entirely, the definition of medical marijuana varies by state. Each state that permits medical marijuana use has defined it. Employers should review medical marijuana laws in each state in which they operate to determine what constitutes medical marijuana in a particular state.

Q: Should employers amend their drug testing policies?

It depends. Employers should review the language in drug and other policies at least annually to ensure compliance with current laws. However, a blanket overhaul of drug policies may not be required depending on the current language used.

Q: Can the DOJ’s order be overturned?

Possibly. Pending litigation seeks to block the DOJ’s rescheduling efforts. However, no court orders have yet been issued to stop the rescheduling.

Q: Is recreational marijuana legal?

No. Recreational marijuana has not been rescheduled and remains a Schedule I substance that is illegal under Federal law.

Bottom line, an employer’s approach to dealing with marijuana at work remains as hazy as ever despite the recent rescheduling, leaving employers with more questions than answers for the foreseeable future. Businesses should consult with their labor & employment counsel as these issues arise and when responding to questions from their employees about marijuana, which will only continue to increase in light of this recent Federal activity.

Navigating PUMP Act for Employers

26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Since its passage, the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers (PUMP) Act has expanded workplace protections for nursing mothers; however, many employers still struggle with compliance. Under the Federal Wage and Hour law, the PUMP Act protects a covered mother’s right to take “a reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for such employee's nursing child for 1 year after the child's birth each time such employee has need to express the milk.” Importantly, employers must also provide a place specifically other than a bathroom that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public. According to some estimates, less than half of employers comply with the PUMP Act, running the risk of claims, charges and/or lawsuits against the employer.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Federal government agency that enforces the Wage and Hour law, found that Hillcrest Medical Center in Oklahoma violated the PUMP Act. The Department found that the hospital illegally restricted nursing employees by setting pumping schedules for specific times and only allowing breaks when staffing was available to cover for the nursing employee. This policy directly clashed with the PUMP Act’s express mandate that employers must provide breaks “each time such employee has need to express the milk.”

Additionally, some employers improperly designate unsanitary, non-private, unsafe, or inconvenient locations for nursing employees, such as improperly requiring employees to pump in a bathroom, which the law prohibits. Such violations of the PUMP Act, and can lead to significant exposure for employers. To avoid legal liability, employers should work with their labor and employment counsel to ensure they provide both a compliant space and the flexibility for nursing mothers to take breaks as reasonably needed.

Your AI-Generated Employee Handbook May Be Your Biggest Legal Liability

26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Artificial intelligence tools have become genuinely useful for many business functions, such as drafting basic correspondence, summarizing documents, and organizing information. It's natural that business owners have started turning to these same tools to generate employee handbooks and workplace policies. The appeal is obvious: AI is fast, cheap, and creates reasonably polished documents.

The problem is that a handbook is not a basic document. It's a collection of policies that governs your employment relationships, often gets introduced as an exhibit in litigation, and — if drafted carelessly — can create liability you never intended.

What AI Gets Wrong

Unlike what the AI-generated handbook may tell you, the workplace is governed by more than Federal law. Federal requirements are just the floor. State and local laws apply as well and may vary significantly on leave entitlements, wage payment rules, required policy disclosures, and more. Without careful review of these different laws, there can be substantial gaps in the AI-generated handbook.

AI tools generate language based on patterns in their training data, not on the current statutes and case law that apply to your business in your jurisdiction. Therefore, the AI handbook might not only miss a State or local law entirely, but could rely on an outdated version of that law. The result is a document that may look comprehensive while missing mandatory provisions entirely — or worse, affirmatively stating something that violates applicable law.

The quality of the output also depends entirely on how the tool was prompted. A well-intentioned prompt can still generate policies that inadvertently create protected-class distinctions, establish disciplinary procedures you cannot consistently follow, or include language that undermines your at-will employment relationship. Most AI tools don't flag these problems. They produce confident-looking text and leave the legal risk assessment to you.

Moreover, many instances of AI “hallucinations” have impacted the legal community, and hallucinations—inaccurate, made-up law that the AI platform asserts with confidence—can also become part of an AI-generated handbook.

The Implied Contract Problem

This problem often surprises employers. In many states, sufficiently definite handbook language — a promised sequence of disciplinary steps before termination, for example — can be treated as a binding contract. Even if the handbook is not a binding contract, when an employee is terminated in a way that doesn't track the handbook's own procedures, that inconsistency becomes a plaintiff's exhibit and a credibility problem for the employer. A properly drafted handbook explains the rights and obligations in the workplace but provides the flexibility necessary to take the right action at the right time. The workplace cannot operate in a “cookie cutter” fashion, because people are not “cookie cutter.” Such nuance is often lost on an AI-platform.

Generic AI output is particularly prone to this. Templates and training data skew toward process-heavy language because such language is prevalent in the AI platform’s sources. An employer who adopts that language without understanding its implications has effectively made promises they may not keep.

Consistency Between Policy and Practice

Even a legally compliant handbook creates exposure if it doesn't reflect how your business actually operates. From a practical perspective, the Handbook needs to be drafted by someone who knows your business, how it operates, and knows the business’s goals. An AI platform only knows what you tell it about your business. Additionally, AI often lacks the experience to see through a business’s request and provide policies that meet the actual business’s needs in light of past practice.

The Right Approach

AI-generated documents are not useless — but they should be treated as a rough starting point, not a finished product. Any handbook built on AI output needs a legal and business-focused review before it's distributed to employees. That review should confirm the document complies with the laws of every state where you have employees, reflects your actual workplace practices, and doesn't inadvertently create obligations or undermine employer protections.

The cost of a handbook review is modest. The cost of defending an employment claim because of a defective AI-generated handbook is not.

Louisiana Senate Advances SB 483 to Restructure Board of Pharmacy

15 May 2026 00:00:00 -0800

The Louisiana Senate voted to pass SB 483, authored by Senator Mike Reese, a bill that would modify the composition and appointment process of the Louisiana Board of Pharmacy by adjusting pharmacist representation, expanding participation from other healthcare providers, and establishing a new appointment structure for Board membership. The bill was then referred to the House Health and Welfare Committee, where it is currently pending.

Under current law (La. R.S. 37:1172 and 1173), the Board is composed of 16 pharmacist members, with two members elected from each of the state’s eight pharmacy districts and appointed by the governor from a slate of nominees, along with one consumer representative. SB 483 maintains a total of 17 members but reduces pharmacist representation to eight members, with one elected from each district, and supplements the Board with eight additional licensed healthcare professional members.

As originally filed, those additional seats included three sterile compounding pharmacists, one chain pharmacist, one hospital pharmacist, one independent community pharmacist, one physician, and one registered nurse, while retaining the consumer representative who serves at the pleasure of the governor.

However, the version that ultimately passed the Senate reflects significant amendments adopted on the floor following changes proposed by the Senate Health and Welfare Committee. Most notably, those amendments revise the composition of the eight healthcare professional seats by eliminating the specifically designated physician and registered nurse positions and replacing them with two at-large members who must be either licensed pharmacists or other licensed healthcare professionals with prescriptive authority, each representing defined groupings of pharmacy districts. The amendments also broaden the compounding pharmacist category from “sterile compounding pharmacists” to “compounding pharmacists” generally, expanding the pool of eligible appointees.

Senator Reese cited the continued growth and increasing regulatory significance of the compounding pharmacy sector in Louisiana as a key rationale for including multiple compounding pharmacist positions on the Board.

For pharmacists and other stakeholders, this shift reduces the number of pharmacist-only seats from sixteen to eight while standardizing the remaining seats into broader, more flexible categories rather than fixed profession-specific roles.

Equally significant, the amendments overhaul the bill’s implementation timeline. As originally filed, SB 483 contemplated a phased transition tied to existing term expirations, allowing certain members to serve out their terms while gradually introducing the new Board composition. The amended version instead adopts a full reset approach: all current Board members will be removed as of June 30, 2026, and the governor will appoint an entirely new 17-member Board by July 1, 2026, with the option to reappoint existing members. For this initial appointment cycle, district pharmacist members will be appointed directly by the governor without the usual nomination and election process set forth in La. R.S. 37:1175(B), and all appointments will be subject to Senate confirmation during the 2027 Regular Session.

The current version of the bill also requires the governor to fill vacancies for the consumer member and the appointed healthcare professional members within 60 days and establishes a two-term limit for all Board members. Importantly, the bill does not change the length of Board member terms. Consistent with current law (La. R.S. 37:1177(A)), members will continue to serve six-year terms beginning July 1 of the year of appointment.

We will continue to monitor the bill as it moves through the legislative process and will provide updates regarding any additional amendments, as well as implementation if the bill is enacted. As of the date of this publication, the SB 483 has not been scheduled for a hearing in House Health and Welfare.

The Evolution of the Definition of Beginning Actual Construction

14 May 2026 00:00:00 -0800

It has long been clear that a permit is required prior to beginning actual construction of a facility that emits pollutants. However, what has not been clear and what has been the subject of much debate and interpretation over the years, is what physical activities denote or constitute the point in time when actual construction has begun.

The current regulatory definition of beginning actual construction is the “initiation of physical on-site construction activities on an emissions unit which are of a permanent nature,” which specifically includes the “installation of building supports and foundations.” An emission unit is “any part of a stationary source that emits or would have the potential to emit any regulated” pollutant.

In December 1978, EPA identified certain limited activities that would not involve the beginning of actual construction. These included such activities as planning, ordering of equipment and material, site-clearing, grading, and on-site storage of equipment and materials. In March 1986, EPA issued the three-page Reich Memorandum, which served to substantially limit the on-site activates that were not considered to constitute beginning actual construction. EPA did so by expansively interpreting the definition of ‘emission unit’ to include not only “units which emit pollutants …, but to any part of the source which emits a pollutant subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.” As a result, “construction is prohibited on any emissions unit or on any installation designed to accommodate the emissions unit.”

In March 2020, the last year of the first Trump Administration, EPA revisited the definition of ‘begin actual construction.’ EPA criticized the interpretation of ‘emissions unit’ in the March 1986 Reich Memorandum as “not the best reading of the relevant regulatory text.” Instead, EPA focused on the phrase “on an emission unit.” An entity may “undertake physical on-site activities - including activities that may be costly, that may significantly alter the site, and/or are permanent in nature - provided that those activities do not constitute physical construction on an emissions unit.”

EPA parsed out the five “distinct criteria” in the first sentence of the definition, all of which must be met, for an entity to ‘begin actual construction.’ The key one is related to construction “on an emission unit.” Generally, the activity had to be “on” the unit that would emit pollutants. As to the ‘installation of building supports and foundations,’ an entity may begin such installation as long as the installation is not “on” an emission unit. Further, an ‘installation necessary to accommodate’ the emissions unit is not considered part of that emissions unit.

EPA provided an example of this interpretation in September 2025. An entity proposed to construct its facility in three stages, with the first involving construction of a core and shell building comprised of the foundation, steel superstructure, and external walls. It did not include any emission units. EPA agreed that the construction of this first stage was not within the definition, “provided that the construction of this core and shell of a building does not involve the physical construction on an emission unit or the laying of underground piping or construction of supports and foundations that are part of any emissions unit.” The March 1986 Reich Memorandum had “adopted an overly broad reading of the term” and the definition of ‘begin actual construction’ “does not prohibit initiation of physical on-site construction of those parts of a facility that do not qualify as an emission unit.” EPA indicated that it intended to “provide more clarity through rulemaking” as to how permitting “authorities may distinguish between emissions units and the other parts of a facility that are not an emissions unit or a part of an emissions unit.”

Following up on its declaration from September 2025, EPA has now proposed a rule that generally codifies its interpretations from March 2020 and September 2025. EPA has proposed to amend the regulatory definition of ‘begin actual construction’ and add a regulatory definition of ‘pollutant-emitting activities.’

Under the proposal, ‘begin actual construction’ “means, in general, initiation of physical on-site construction of pollutant-emitting activities on a stationary source.” The proposed definition specifically excludes, among other things, such activities as design planning, geotechnical investigation, clearing vegetation, grading, surveying, soil compacting and stabilization, and excavating land, ordering of equipment and materials, storing of equipment, or paving surfaces.

‘Pollutant-emitting activities’ are proposed to “include any equipment or component in a process or operation that emits or has the potential to emit” a regulated pollutant.” The proposed definition specifically excludes, among other things, office buildings, buildings or structures designed for storage (if the material to be stored is not capable of producing vapors or particles), and equipment whose sole purpose is heating ventilation and air conditioning for human workspaces or spaces.

Most importantly, though, it codifies the broad approach from March 2020 and September 2025 regarding a building that is not an emission unit. Pollutant-emitting activities do not include concrete pads and building foundations, walls, and roofs that are not closed in on the interior side and do not have design elements (e.g., piping, ductwork, wiring, anchor bolts) specifically and uniquely configured to serve or support any equipment or component in a process that emits or has the potential to emit a regulated pollutant.

Generally, through these two proposed amendments, EPA seeks to allow construction, before obtaining a permit, of components that do not emit air pollutants, such as utility service infrastructure, concrete pads, and some types of buildings and building components. Construction of equipment or a component that could emit pollutants still requires a permit prior to construction.

Seventh Annual Labor & Employment Conference for Healthcare Professionals

14 May 2026 00:00:00 -0800