Checklists, frameworks, and quick-reference guides for in‑house counsel on employment risk, commercial disputes, and AI legal risk — the charge that arrived this morning, the termination scheduled for Friday, the demand letter sitting in someone’s inbox, the AI tool HR switched on without asking.
I’m Tom Cedoz, a litigator at Husch Blackwell. These are the tools I wish every client had before they called. How I work
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No email gate, no follow-up call
Most print to one or two pages
General information, not legal advice
Fig. 1 — the policy, the email, the review, the hold: dated before the complaint
Fig. 1 — the policy, the email, the review, the hold: dated before the complaint
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.
A one-page review to run before any contested termination, from the one-sentence reason to final-pay mechanics. The terminations that fall apart tend to fall apart on question two.
A first-week sequence for any serious demand: deadlines, preservation, insurance notice, the contract itself, and choosing a response posture on purpose.
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.
What an acceptable-use policy actually needs — approved tools, the one data rule everyone remembers, verification duties, and the uses to put off-limits.
Adverse impact, ADA, and bias-audit exposure when an algorithm screens your applicants — and why “the vendor built it” is not a defense.
risk review · 2 pages→
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.
The 2026 pullback in AI regulation is real — and misread. The deadlines that moved, the machinery date that didn’t, and the Workday docket where the real rules are being written.
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
Missing something? If there’s a checklist or framework your team keeps wishing existed, say so — the library grows where readers point it.