SEARCH FOR STABILITY - In-house recruiters were reveling in a red-hot hiring market just a few months ago, while also wondering when the inevitable cool down would begin. Suddenly, it’s downright chilly. “My team is working on some strong searches, but it’s not that frenzied pace,” said Carolyn Aberman, national in-house practice leader at Lucas Group in Chicago, told Law.com’s Phillip Bantz and Dan Roe . “To the extent that we’re seeing freezes or the pullbacks, that’s related to fear of what’s coming up,” Aberman added. “My prediction is that we’ll see a bit of caution while we wait out the next round of economic news, but I don’t envision a massive hit to in-house hiring happening any time soon.” Still, as layoffs hit legal departments of tech and crypto companies, in-house lawyers are already looking at law firms’ countercyclical nature as a source of potential stability amid economic uncertainty. “It doesn’t get spelled out quite as bluntly,” said Avis Caravello, a San Francisco law firm recruiter, of her conversations with in-house lawyers considering a law firm job. “If I’m talking to someone looking to come back into a law firm from in-house as a partner, they’ve probably done both already. It’s implicit they’re thinking along those lines, particularly here in the Bay Area where there have been a number of tech-company-wide layoffs.”
CRIMES OF CONVENIENCE - Dozens of lawsuits allege Kia and Hyundai have made it easy for criminals to steal their cars, which, from a legal perspective, is decidedly not what you want. The suits claim the carmakers failed to include a common security feature in their vehicles, leading to a surge of car thefts aided by viral videos on TikTok and YouTube demonstrating exactly how to steal them, Law.com’s Amanda Bronstad reports. Car owners have filed more than 30 class actions, alleging Kia America Inc. and Hyundai Motor America failed to install an “immobilizer”—a security flaw exploited by a group of Milwaukee teenagers calling themselves Kia Boyz, whose tutorials on social media have spawned a rise in thefts of the vehicles. In lawsuits filed in the past two months, plaintiffs say thieves drove off with their cars, many recovered in other locations and usually damaged. “It’s the modern day hotwire,” said Roland Tellis, of Baron & Budd in Dallas, “but instead of a screwdriver, folks are using a USB cord. And, if you look on TikTok or YouTube, there are videos that are literally how-to’s for would-be thieves to steal these vehicles by popping the dash and shoving a USB cord or some similar device into a slot, like folks used to do with screwdrivers back in the day, and start these cars.”
ON THE RADAR - Estee Lauder, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics and other cosmetics companies were hit with a biometric privacy class action Tuesday in Illinois Northern District Court arising from the virtual try-on feature on the defendants’ websites. The court action accuses the defendants of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by surreptitiously collecting the facial scans of users of the virtual try-on feature. The lawsuit was brought by a trio of law firms: DiCello Levitt Gutzler; Don Bivens PLLC; and Hausfeld. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendants. The case is 1:22-cv-05713, Castelaz et al v. The Estee Lauder Companies Inc. et al. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar.
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