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Nasir and Matt talk about the recent Yahoo sexual harassment claim involving two women and answer, "Why is it that manufacturers refrain from mentioning one another in their advertisements (eg. "Tide cleans better than these other brands - bunch of white bottles with no labels")? This is observed with, well, basically every niche of the commercial market, with two exceptions I've regularly noticed, Pepsi vs. Coke and cars." Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: And this is our business legal podcast where we cover business in the news and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com and also follow our Twitter account where you can also ask questions @askbizlaw. I want to say “askbizlaw.com” but it’s just “askbizlaw.” MATT: I don’t think we have that one. NASIR: Twitter. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: We probably have the dot-pizza one. MATT: Are you asking people to send their questions via Twitter? NASIR: Yeah, that’d be cool. MATT: That’s tough – limited number of characters. NASIR: That’s true. I didn’t even think about that but we’re also accepting questions on Reddit. That was cool. We do that every week. We do an AMA. I have lots of options for you. If you have a short question, Twitter is good for it. MATT: They’ll have to find out who we are on Reddit, I guess. It should be pretty obvious. NASIR: Search “Legally Sound Smart Business” and then we should come up. MATT: All right. Well, we have a pretty interesting story for today because it deals with a lot of different things going on. It’s a Yahoo executive. She and Yahoo in general are being sued by a former principal software engineer for sexual harassment and wrongful termination. Now, we’ve talked about similar things in the past but it’s typically been a male superior and the lawsuit’s been brought by a female – I don’t want to say… NASIR: Inferior. Uh, subordinate. MATT: A female employee. Now, we have a female executive or superior and also a female employee. That’s a little bit different. Also, typically, with these there’d be some sort of reaction from the company. Yahoo is just straight up denying any of this happening and is very strong in their stance. NASIR: Yeah, that seems unusual. MATT: Yeah, I won’t get into the specifics of this unless you want to, but we’ll link the article so they can read because there’s a lot of accusations made. This also is taking place in another country, too, I believe, right? NASIR: I don’t think so. I thought it was still in California. I know the suit’s in California so I assumed it’s in California but maybe not. We’ll take a look. But, you know, what’s interesting about this is, well, first of all, again, Silicon Valley is another scandal when it comes to the workplace environment. We covered Tinder. There’s this other case with a Google executive who overdosed on heroine on his yacht and some kind of killing as well. Silicon Valley is just being hit with a lot of issues right now. But I think what people may find significant – and this isn’t the first time that it’s happened – it’s when you have a female supervisor that’s being accused of this. I think people need to understand that these issues, when it comes to sexual harassment and wrongful termination, they stem from having power over another. That’s the main issue and that’s the main concept of employment law protections because, when you have an employee, they’re in your control as opposed to an independent contractor where the control is a little bit more loose. But, when you have an employee, because of that control, you have certain obligations that you may not have as a non-employer and I think, even though people generally understand this, they may not understand the significance and how much they could become liable, especially in California, for things like these. MATT: Yeah,