The video game maker Activision Blizzard, Inc. is being sued for gender discrimination and harassment. The $60 billion company, behind games that include Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, isn't being sued by female employees in this suit though. They're being sued by the state of California.

California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing says its two-year investigation into Activision Blizzard found a "frat boy" culture where its female workers are regularly subjected to sexual banter and jokes about rape, among other forms of harassment. The female employees were also held back from promotions, paid less than their male coworkers, and criticized for leaving to pick up their children from daycare, according to the suit.

On this episode of On The Merits, Maeve Allsup, our California correspondent, talks about why the state brought the hammer down on the video game maker, and why the involvement of a government regulator could represent a turning point. 

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On this special weekend episode of On The Merits, reporter Lydia Wheeler reads her story about the difficulties some long-Covid victims are facing with insurance claims. Click here to read the story in print.

Several states opted to temporarily suspend their bar exams when the pandemic broke out last year. This led many in the legal community to question why the exam exists in the first place.

Now at least one state is seriously considering alternative ways to certify new law school grads. The Oregon Supreme Court is currently weighing a proposal that would make the bar exam just one of several options aspiring attorneys there can choose to earn their license.

On today's episode of our weekly legal news podcast, On The Merits, we hear from Brian Gallini, one of the people who drafted that proposal. Gallini, the dean of the Willamette University College of Law, talks about why he thinks the bar exam should be scrapped altogether but why replacing it with so-called "diploma privilege" isn't a good option either.audio embed goes here

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Morgan Stanley's chief legal officer issued a memo earlier this month that has the legal world buzzing. In it, Eric Grossman all but demanded that the law firms working with the financial industry giant end their pandemic work-from-home policies.

News of an in-house counsel dictating to outside law firms the locations from which their lawyers should be working (news that was first reported by Bloomberg Law) has ricocheted across the legal world. In this episode of On The Merits, reporters Brian Baxter and Meghan Tribe discuss why Grossman sent this memo, whether Morgan Stanley can actually force its firms to end remote work, and how all this could affect big law recruitment.

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A team of Bloomberg reporters has been reaching out to elections officials in every state for months to try to get a sense of how often voting fraud actually happens. In all, they found roughly 200 instances over the past two years, where people were charged or convicted for alleged voting fraud.

On today's episode of On The Merits, we hear from the lead reporter on this team, Alex Ebert, about voting fraud prosecutions in America. Ebert also talks about the state officials from both parties who worry the current discussion on voting fraud is eroding faith in the electoral system.

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Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and once the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, has been disciplined over his role in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Other lawyers who represented the President could also get hit with sanctions.

What does it mean to have your law license suspended? What can and can't lawyers do when they've been sanctioned? And why are these attorneys facing discipline when their clients are, by and large, happy with their work? For answers, we turn to Bloomberg Law legal ethics reporter Melissa Heelan. She breaks down the distinction between license suspension and disbarment and explores why, what these attorneys are accused of, makes their cases so unique.

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Amy Chua, the Yale Law School professor and self-described "tiger mom," is making headlines again amid a battle with her Ivy League employer. On this episode of On The Merits, Chua talks to Bloomberg Law columnist Vivia Chen about why she finds herself embroiled in controversy now and how challenging it's been for her family.

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In April, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Department of Justice would investigate policing practices in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Now many law enforcement experts expect to see cities enter into consent decrees to address civil rights violations at the hands of the police, among other operational reforms.

Consent decrees present an interesting opportunity for some law firms. In the past, decrees have often required that outside firms are hired to monitor the conduct of the police department and make recommendations for reforms. Big firms like Venable and Sheppard Mullin have served this role in some cities and others, like DLA Piper, are trying to get into the game.

On this episode of On The Merits, Bloomberg Law's Ayanna Alexander tells us why some Big Law firms are taking on this work, and the unique challenges that firms face when they do.

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On this weekend edition of our legal news podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law editor Carmen Castro-Pagan tells us about a federal judge who grew so frustrated by a protracted discovery dispute that her feelings could only be expressed through with one simple character: 🤯

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The country's biggest, most profitable law firms—think Milbank, Davis Polk, Paul Weiss, and Cravath—are falling all over themselves to increase the salaries of their associates with many bumping up the wages of first-year associates to more than $200,000.

On this episode of our weekly podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law's Meghan Tribe explains what's driving this attorney salary arms race, and she talks about how much higher associate salaries can possibly go.

She also says that, while these just-out-of-law-school lawyers may be earning top dollar, their lives are far from luxurious.

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