Insights

Washington – June 11, 2026: Crowell & Moring is proud to announce that the firm has been recognized with an Outstanding Achievement Award by the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs at the 2026 Wiley A. Branton Luncheon. The award celebrates the firm's work on behalf of tenants of the Franklin Apartments, a building in northeast Washington, D.C., where residents endured years of deplorable housing conditions before the firm helped secure a landmark settlement. 

London – June 11, 2026: Crowell & Moring Partner Emma Wright has been appointed to the UK Government's newly formed Digital ID Advisory Group, an independent body of experts convened by Right Honorable Darren Jones MP, to support the delivery of a national digital ID system that is inclusive, useful, and trusted. 

San Francisco – June 11, 2026: The Daily Journal has named Joanna Forster to its 2026 list of “Top Women Lawyers” in California. The annual award series recognizes the successes and victories of women lawyers in the courtroom and at the negotiating table, as well as their advancements in the legal industry. Forster, who has over two decades of experience in government, in-house, and private practice, is a partner in Crowell & Moring's Litigation Group. 

On June 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a formal opinion concluding that the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission’s (EEOC) existing interpretations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) disparate-impact liability, including the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP), are unconstitutional. According to the opinion, EEOC’s prior interpretations contemplate liability based on disproportionately adverse effects alone, without regard to an employer’s likely intent, rather than treating disparate impact as an evidentiary mechanism to “smoke out” intentional discrimination. DOJ found that this approach functions as a “qualified racial-proportionality mandate” that places “a racial thumb on the scales, often requiring employers to evaluate the racial outcomes of their policies, and to make decisions based on (because of) those racial outcomes.” The opinion fulfills one mandate of Executive Order 14281, which rejected disparate-impact liability insofar as it “creates a near insurmountable presumption that unlawful discrimination exists wherever there are any differences in outcomes among different [demographic groups].”

When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated the FTC's Combating Auto Retail Scams (CARS) Rule in January 2025 on procedural grounds, some dealers may have interpreted the decision as a signal that federal regulatory pressure on the auto industry had eased. Recent developments make clear that such optimism was misplaced.

The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is an EU product cybersecurity law for connected products (formally, “products with digital elements” under the CRA) commercialized in the EU; it entered into force on 10 December 2024, with direct application across the EU. Full application begins 11 December 2027, but one of its most operationally demanding provisions takes effect in just under 100 days, on 11 September 2026: the mandatory vulnerability and incident reporting under Article 14 CRA.

Calling all dog lovers! Join Crowell & Moring for a program tailored for the in-house community, including members of ACC Southern California. The session will feature a collaborative discussion on three dimensions of well-being and the “superpowers” they can provide in-house teams, along with time to engage with therapy dogs from OC Animal Allies!

Digital Product Passports are set to transform how products are sold across Europe. For consumers, this means unprecedented access to product information. Sustainability and compliance data, alongside other key product details, will become far easier to access and compare than ever before. As a “single source of truth” for products, DPPs may also enable EU authorities to identify non-compliance more quickly and efficiently, potentially restricting or preventing non-compliant products from entering the European market.

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This week’s episode covers a new Executive Order on fixed-price contracting, a new DOJ initiative targeting coordination with data-mining qui tam relators, and a proposed rule that would extend FOCI reviews to uncleared defense contractors, and is hosted by Peter Eyre and Yuan Zhou. Crowell & Moring’s “Fastest 5 Minutes” is a biweekly podcast that provides a brief summary of significant government contracts legal and regulatory developments that no government contracts lawyer or executive should be without.