More than 3.5 million sports-related concussions take place in the United States each year. Sports injuries are most prevalent in the high school setting, and injuries can be fatal. Perhaps the most shocking reality is that the majority of the legal cases which develop as a result of these sports injuries and fatalities will be dismissed in court. The reason being, that on every occasion a person voluntarily attends or participates in any sporting event, he or she is surrendering an individual right to sue for injury or death whether expressly agreed to or not. Courts recognize this principle as “primary assumption of risk.” Illinois courts have promulgated a more fine tuned law for contact sports because of their propensity to result in the most debilitating injuries. However, participants are not the only characters involved, spectators at sporting events also assume similar foreseeable risks. Although these key players are sacrificing the right to sue, many fear that increasing liability under the assumption of risk doctrine will eventually result in the elimination of the sports industry altogether. Sports competition by its very nature cannot divorce itself of the innate risk of injury, and if the attachment of liability to foreseeable conduct in unregulated and regulated sports activities were a reality, the potential for consequential high court costs, verdicts, and settlements would deprive America of its favorite pastime. [More]

What does employee turnover look like these days? Well, much like pouring liquid into a sieve- analogous to employees passing through a company much too rapidly. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collects and compiles monthly data on a sampling of business establishments, the total number of employees who left their jobs exceeded those being hired from July 2008 through June 2009. “Over the 12 months ending in June, hires totaled 51.8 million and separations totaled 57.1 million, yielding a net employment loss of 5.3 million.” The increasing problem of employee turnover seems to revolve around two vital issues. Companies do not fully understand what causes employee turnover, and they do not know how to go about correcting the problem. This article will discuss: 1) the costs and causes of employee turnover; 2) the methods by which different companies have approached the problem; and 3) how excessive employee turnover can be a direct result of conscious or unconscious discriminatory behavior by employers. [More]