A working library for legal departments
Checklists, frameworks, and quick-reference guides for in‑house counsel navigating employment risk and commercial disputes — the charge that arrived this morning, the termination scheduled for Friday, the demand letter sitting in someone’s inbox.
I’m Tom Cedoz, a litigator at Husch Blackwell. These are the tools I wish every client had before they called. How I work
Visual guide · Commercial
The whole arc of a business case — pleadings, discovery, experts, summary judgment, trial — with the clocks, the cost curve, the load on your team, and the exits along the way. The map the other tools live on.
Checklist · Employment
What to do — and not do — between the day a charge arrives and the end of that week. Deadlines, holds, carrier notice, and the retaliation briefing.
Framework · Employment
A one-page review to run before any contested termination, from the one-sentence reason to final-pay mechanics. Most failed terminations fail on question two.
Framework · Commercial
A first-week sequence for any serious demand: deadlines, preservation, insurance notice, the contract itself, and choosing a response posture on purpose.
Checklist · Cross-practice
When the duty to preserve attaches, what a defensible hold covers, the sources teams forget, and how to end a hold without breaking your retention policy.
AI changes the workflow, not your legal duties. For the in-house team deciding what to adopt, how to govern it, and who answers when it gets something wrong.
Quick reference · AI & risk
A buyer’s field guide for cutting through the pitch: where AI genuinely reduces risk, where it manufactures it, and the questions to ask any vendor.
Checklist · AI & risk
What an acceptable-use policy actually needs — approved tools, the one data rule everyone remembers, verification duties, and the uses to put off-limits.
Framework · AI & risk
Adverse impact, ADA, and bias-audit exposure when an algorithm screens your applicants — and why “the vendor built it” is not a defense.
The record that decides a dispute is written in ordinary weeks — a policy update, a performance review, an email no one thought twice about. These tools are for writing it on purpose.
Manufacturing—Healthcare—Transportation—Technology
Built for the people who own these problems in-house. If something here is useful, take it. The full library
Commentary · Apple v. OpenAI
Most trade-secret complaints are stretch cases. Apple’s filing against OpenAI, as pleaded, is not — a litigator on the line between skill that moves and work product that doesn’t.
July 2026
Michigan Litigation Journal · State Bar of Michigan
Michigan’s e-filing patchwork turns ordinary filings into logistical problems. An open-source proof of concept — built and published with the article — shows what a unified statewide system could look like.
Spring 2026
Husch Blackwell · Legal Update
Ohio’s new professional-conduct guidance distills the sanctions orders and emerging consensus on generative AI into practical guardrails — what it actually asks of lawyers and judges.
June 2026
Missing something? If there’s a checklist or framework your team keeps wishing existed, say so — the library grows where readers point it.