Three HR Legal Updates Employers Should Understand
Medical marijuana, employee claim-filing deadlines, and AI in HR are changing the conversations employers need to have.
Legal updates usually tell you what changed. For HR leaders, that's only half the story.
Keeping up with HR legal updates isn't just about knowing a new rule or court decision. It's about understanding what that change means when you're writing a policy, responding to an employee, conducting an investigation, or making an employment decision.
Three recent developments are worth understanding beyond the headline: the federal reclassification of medical marijuana, a Michigan Supreme Court decision affecting employee claim-filing deadlines, and the growing legal considerations around AI in HR.
Here's the context behind each one, where it intersects with HR operations, and what employers should be thinking about next.
1. Medical Marijuana in the Workplace: Why Does the Schedule III Change Matter to HR?
On April 22, 2026, the federal government changed how it classifies medical marijuana, moving it from Schedule I to Schedule III. Recreational marijuana did not move.
The difference between those classifications matters.
Schedule I is reserved for substances the federal government considers to have no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
Schedule III substances have an accepted medical use and are recognized differently under federal drug classifications.
That's the important context behind the change for HR: medical marijuana is no longer sitting in the same federal category as a substance with no recognized medical use.
How Does Medical Marijuana Reclassification Affect HR Operations?
Think about what's actually written in your employee handbook.
Many drug and alcohol policies were built around a relatively straightforward distinction between "illegal drugs" and prescription medications. If your policy puts marijuana entirely into the first bucket, the reclassification creates a reason to look at that language again.
It also changes the conversation when an employee tells HR they use medical marijuana.
Instead of treating authorized medical use exactly like illegal drug use, HR now has to consider the same kinds of questions that come up when an employee uses another prescription medication. Is there a disability involved? Is an accommodation being requested? Can the employee safely perform the essential functions of the job? Would the accommodation create a direct threat to safety?
Testing creates another operational consideration. A marijuana test involving medical use now falls under ADA medical-examination and confidentiality requirements. Employers need a work-related reason for the test that meets the "job-related and consistent with business necessity" standard, and the resulting medical information needs to be stored confidentially and separately from the employee's regular personnel file.
What Hasn't Changed?
Plenty did not change. Marijuana is not legal everywhere. You do not have to let anyone use it at work or show up impaired. Michigan employers can still run a drug-free workplace, and federal rules still apply to truck drivers (DOT regulations) and federal contractors (the federal Drug-Free Workplace Act).
And there's an important limitation to marijuana testing that every manager should understand:
Can a Marijuana Drug Test Tell When Someone Last Used Marijuana?
A positive test cannot tell you whether marijuana was consumed an hour ago or last weekend. That technology does not exist.
For HR, that makes reasonable-suspicion training more than a policy exercise. Supervisors need to know what signs of potential impairment look like, what they should document, who they should contact, and what should happen before testing.
Put It Into Practice
Take your current drug and alcohol policy and read it through this new lens.
Where does medical marijuana appear? How is "illegal drug" defined? How are prescription medications addressed? Where are test results stored? What happens when an employee requests an accommodation?
And here's a practical test: If a manager suspected an employee was impaired tomorrow morning, would they actually know what to do?
The answers to those questions will tell you much more about whether your organization is prepared than simply knowing marijuana changed schedules.
2. Michigan Employment Law: What Rayford Means for Employee Claim-Filing Deadlines
Some Michigan employers include shortened claim-filing deadlines in their employment documents.
In plain language: the employee agrees that if they bring certain legal claims against the employer, they have to do it sooner than the deadline normally allowed under the law.
A common example is a 180-day deadline when the law might otherwise provide considerably more time.
For years, Michigan courts upheld these shortened deadlines. Then came Rayford.
On July 31, 2025, the Michigan Supreme Court changed how these agreements are evaluated.
What Happened in Rayford?
The case involved a nursing assistant who received onboarding documents shortly after beginning employment. One document required her to bring any claim within 180 days.
She signed it.
Nearly three years after leaving, she brought discrimination and harassment claims. The employer pointed to the signed agreement, and two lower courts sided with the employer.
The Michigan Supreme Court determined that the signature wasn't the end of the analysis.
There are two important ideas for employers to understand.
First, how the agreement was presented matters.
Think about a typical first week at work. A new employee receives a stack of documents and is told where to sign. They generally aren't sitting across from HR negotiating individual provisions.
The legal term for this type of take-it-or-leave-it agreement is an "adhesion contract." What employers really need to know is that courts take a closer look at agreements employees had little or no opportunity to negotiate.
The Court determined that most shortened-deadline agreements presented this way during onboarding fall into this category.
Second, the deadline still has to be reasonable.
An employee's signature doesn't automatically settle the issue.
A judge can consider whether the employee realistically had enough time to understand what happened and pursue a claim, whether the shortened period effectively prevented them from filing, and whether the deadline expired before they could even know they'd been harmed.
If the deadline is unreasonable, a judge can set it aside.
Why Should HR Care About a Lawsuit-Filing Deadline?
Because this isn't just a litigation issue. It's an onboarding-document issue.
HR is often responsible for the applications, handbook acknowledgments, new-hire paperwork, electronic onboarding workflows, and other documents where this language lives.
And those documents can stick around for years.
A provision may have been added long before the person currently managing HR joined the organization. It may live inside a template nobody has questioned recently. Or your HR system may automatically send it to every new employee because that's simply how onboarding has always been configured.
Rayford gives employers a reason to find that language and look at it again.
Put It Into Practice
Pull your actual onboarding packet, not the version you think employees receive.
Check the job application, offer and onboarding materials, handbook acknowledgment, electronic onboarding workflow, and anything else requiring an employee's signature.
If you find a shortened claim-filing deadline, bring it to employment counsel for review.
Look at the process around the document, too. What is the employee being asked to sign? When do they receive it? How is it presented? How much opportunity do they have to review it?
The lesson isn't simply "180 days is bad." Michigan courts have not established one universal number that is automatically unreasonable.
The bigger lesson is that the circumstances and reasonableness of the deadline matter.
3. AI in HR: Are You Managing the Legal Record You're Creating?
AI is already part of the workplace.
An HR professional can use it to summarize an interview, organize investigation notes, draft a disciplinary document, compare information, or think through a complicated employee situation in seconds.
The efficiency is obvious.
What's easier to overlook is the record you're creating along the way.
Can AI Conversations Become Part of a Lawsuit?
If an organization becomes involved in a lawsuit, attorneys can request records that are relevant to the case through a process called discovery.
That matters when AI has been used as part of the HR process.
Prompts, responses, drafts, versions, and AI conversations connected to regular HR work can become relevant records. Certain work prepared specifically for a lawsuit at the direction of legal counsel can receive legal protections, but ordinary HR investigation and disciplinary records aren't automatically protected simply because AI was involved.
The practical takeaway is straightforward: don't type something into an AI tool during a sensitive HR matter assuming nobody else will ever see it.
An AI Summary Doesn't Replace Your Original Records
Consider a seemingly simple workflow:
An HR professional interviews an employee.
They record the interview.
They use AI to create a summary.
HR saves the summary and deletes the original recording.
The summary may be easier to work with, but it hasn't replaced the original evidence.
Once a lawsuit is reasonably expected, employers have a responsibility to preserve records related to the matter, including digital files and recordings. Deleting relevant evidence after that responsibility kicks in can create serious legal problems.
There's another reason to keep the original: AI can get the summary wrong.
The original recording, notes, or document remains your source of truth. An AI-generated summary should support the work, not replace the underlying record.
AI Can Sound Right and Still Be Wrong
AI can produce information that sounds completely credible and isn't true. You may have heard this called an AI "hallucination."
In marketing copy, that might mean catching a bad statistic before something gets published.
In an employee investigation, the stakes are considerably higher.
Imagine AI summarizes several interviews and incorrectly attributes a statement to one employee. Someone reads the summary, assumes it's accurate, and that information contributes to a termination decision.
Now the employer has to explain why that decision was made.
That's why human verification isn't a nice-to-have in HR. The person making the employment decision needs to verify the underlying information and document the actual reasoning behind the decision.
"The AI recommended it" isn't an HR decision-making process.
What Does Responsible AI Use Look Like for HR?
Start with something more useful than a blanket "don't use AI" rule.
Your team needs clear answers to practical questions:
What HR information can be entered into approved AI tools?
What information should never be entered?
Can AI be used for employee investigations?
Can it summarize interview recordings?
Who checks its output for accuracy?
What original materials need to be kept?
If a lawsuit is expected, does your process account for AI prompts, responses, and previous versions?
What does your AI tool save, and for how long?
And perhaps most importantly: who owns the final decision?
AI can help organize the work. A human still needs to own the facts, judgment, and employment decision.
HR Legal Updates: What to Watch
The changes above give employers plenty to work with now, but none of these areas are standing still. Here are the developments HR teams should continue watching.
Recreational marijuana could be next. A possible move of adult-use marijuana to Schedule III would send employers back to their drug and alcohol policies again. Watch for federal action as well as new guidance and court rulings addressing how the ADA's medical-examination and confidentiality requirements apply to marijuana testing.
State law matters, too. Employers with remote or multistate teams should continue watching for new protections around off-duty marijuana use in every state where employees work.
Michigan courts still need to define how short is too short. Rayford established that shortened claim-filing deadlines need to be reasonable, but Michigan judges have not established one specific timeframe that is automatically reasonable or unreasonable. Future cases will help define where that line falls.
It's also worth watching whether the same reasoning reaches other provisions employers ask new hires to sign, including jury trial waivers, class action waivers, and non-competes. Courts have so far held that Rayford does not invalidate arbitration agreements, which determine where a claim is heard rather than shortening the time available to bring it.
Courts are still defining the rules around AI records. Watch for decisions addressing when AI conversations have to be provided during a lawsuit, what happens when employers discard original records after creating AI summaries, and how legal protections apply when AI is used at the direction of an attorney.
State and local requirements around AI in employment decisions are evolving, too. For organizations operating across multiple jurisdictions, where an employee works can change which requirements apply.
What These Three Updates Have in Common
At first glance, medical marijuana, a Michigan Supreme Court decision, and artificial intelligence don't have much in common.
From an HR operations perspective, they do.
All three expose the gap that can develop between what your policies say and how work actually happens.
Your drug policy may have been written when medical marijuana sat in a different federal classification.
Your onboarding packet may contain a provision nobody has reviewed in years.
Your HR team may already be using AI even though your employee handbook, investigation procedures, and records-retention practices don't mention it.
That's why keeping up with HR legal updates isn't just about knowing what changed.
It's about asking a better question:
Does the way we're operating today still match the environment we're operating in?
That's where a proactive HR review earns its value.
Need help connecting the dots between legal updates and your day-to-day HR operations? HR Collaborative can help you review current policies and processes, identify where gaps exist, and turn what needs to change into practical next steps for your team.
This article is intended for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Employers should consult qualified legal counsel regarding their specific circumstances.
Looking for more recent developments? Read our July Michigan HR Legal Update.
