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Nasir and Matt get into the story that may rethink your decision for terminating someone for having a headache (migraine). They also answer the question, "I want to hire an employee from a competitor but I think he may have signed a non-compete. What can I legally do to steal him?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: This is Matt Staub. NASIR: Welcome to our business legal podcast where we cover business in the news and also answer some of your business legal questions that you have graciously sent in to our podcast at ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com, including a question from someone we know that is in San Diego that… oh, wait. MATT: That’s not today, though. Well, if they’re listening, they know we’ll address their question later in the week. NASIR: Oh, that’s true. Yeah, they sent in a question – not by email, though – which I guess they can do. They can stop us and write a note and fold it and then hand it to us. That’s one way to do it. MATT: Well, it wasn’t a note, but he or she just said, “Hey, I have a question for you,” and I said, “Okay.” They told me it and it was actually last week. It was actually, like, three weeks ago, I think – the last time I saw them. NASIR: Three weeks ago? MATT: And then, I said to them, “Hey, you know what? I’m going to actually use your question this week, if you’re fine with that. I’ll keep you anonymous,” and they said, “Yeah, that’s fine.” So, that wasn’t a great story. NASIR: We should give a clue of who it is. Like, we should give a clue that it’s a male in San Diego. MATT: Well, maybe. We’ll decide on how we want to handle it when we get to Friday. NASIR: Okay, all right. Let’s just go to Friday now. MATT: Ah NASIR: So excited. MATT: Well, we have something that’s less exciting I guess to talk about today. This deals with the FMLA which, for you those of you that don’t know, is the Family and Medical Leave Act. Basically, what this story comes down to is you can make an FMLA claim and it typically deals with, I think probably one of the biggest issues of this is usually pregnancy leave or things like that NASIR: Yeah. MATT: I mean, that’s usually when the FMLA gets brought up. But this deals with headaches and specifically migraine headaches. So, I don’t think I’ve ever had a migraine headache so I don’t know how bad it is for people. NASIR: Have you known anyone with migraines? MATT: Well, that’s what I was going to say. I know people that have had issues with it and I guess, when they get the migraine headaches, they just can’t really do anything. But, like I said, in my shoes, it’s hard to figure out how bad it is because I don’t think I’ve ever had one. NASIR: Yeah, I’ve only experienced it through other people as well, but I know someone that gets it probably – I’d have to ask them but I would estimate – maybe once a month. When he gets them, he literally shuts himself off from the world, turns off all the lights because, you know, it creates a huge amount of sensitivity to light – you know, you can get nauseous and so forth, depends on how severe it is – and takes the medicine or whatever and just kind of sits there the whole day until it goes away and there’s not much they can do besides that. You know, he’s tried a number of different things but I’m just trying to highlight that the Family Medical Leave Act does provide for medical leave only to certain conditions. Obviously, a mere headache is not enough but the Department of Labor has considered migraines as to be covered under FMLA as a covered medical condition. MATT: Yeah, and that’s basically what this is despite the fact that the picture is of a dog with an icepack on its head. I thought migraines were only for dogs until you just informed me. NASIR: Well, yeah, it’s for people, too. And FMLA doesn’t cover dogs, I don’t believe. We’ll have to check into that. MATT: Yeah, we’ll look into that.