Human Trafficking Lawsuits + Hiring Seasonal Workers + Ballot Measures Results + Property Tax Bills + Workplace Law Forecast 2023

Hotels have recently faced a flood of human trafficking related lawsuits. In these lawsuits, human trafficking victims and their families are alleging negligence and violations of state and federal human trafficking laws against hotels. Several human trafficking lawsuits against hotels have alleged violations of the Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act.

Pursuant to the TVPRA, victims and their families can file lawsuits against not only overt facilitators of their injuries but any entity, like a hotel, that knew or should have known it was doing business with a trafficker. TVPRA plaintiffs, if successful, can recover actual damages, punitive damages and reasonable attorneys’ fees. To mitigate the damages from TVPRA and other human trafficking claims, hotels are looking to their commercial general liability policies for insurance coverage. Whether CGL policies provide coverage for human trafficking claims is a relatively new question that has become the subject of judicial discourse. In particular, several courts have focused in on whether an assault and battery exclusion precludes GCL coverage for these types of claims.

It’s never easy to make accurate predictions about what we might expect to see in the workplace in the coming year.

After all:

At the start of 2020, no one could have predicted COVID-19.
None of us had heard the phrase "the Great Resignation" in January 2021.
And a year ago at this time, "quiet quitting" wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

Despite the ever-present uncertainty, we asked our firm’s thought leaders to develop their best predictions for 2022 during the first half of this past year, which you might remember from our FP Forecast series that ran starting in January.

And as you can see on the next pages, they did a pretty good job anticipating what the year would bring.