Commercial Law

One U.S. Supreme Court decision this past term brought welcomed news to those labeled 'potentially responsible parties' under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. In United States v. Atlantic Research, the Court unanimously agreed that PRPs that voluntarily clean up contaminated property may bring suit for cost recovery against other PRPs under '107 of CERCLA. The Court's opinion left certain questions unanswered and even raised one or two new questions.

If Microsoft can conquer Yahoo with its blustery takeover bid, there may still be another storm on the horizon over intellectual property. The two companies' views about what should be shared and what should be kept proprietary have been as different as Yahoo's sunny Silicon Valley and Microsoft's dreary Seattle.

No one would deny that those in the e-commerce economy 'work hard for the money,' in the words of nascent e-commerce entrepreneur and one-time disco queen Donna Summer. But is 'workin' for a living' any different for an e-commerce manager or executive than for the rest of us? To consider how dot-com employment has evolved over the past few years, I looked at a random sample of recent employment agreements to identify current practices and techniques in e-commerce employment contracting.

Businesses purchase fidelity insurance to cover their losses from crime such as employee theft and forgery. This need is usually most pronounced for banks and other financial service firms, where employees have access to enormous amounts of money. For these policyholders, misplaced trust in a resourceful employee can result in millions of dollars disappearing from the policyholder or its clients with only a few keystrokes.

Many policyholders have large deductibles or retentions in their liability policies. Insurers that agree to defend policyholders against a claim falling within the coverage of a liability policy typically also want to control the litigation strategy and/or settlement discussions. What happens when the insurer wants to settle a claim within the deductible or retention amount, making the policyholder liable for the entire settlement, but the policyholder does not want to settle?

In coverage litigation, insurers often treat extrinsic evidence as if it were radioactive material, and there is some justification for this instinct. Generally, consideration of extrinsic evidence connotes an ambiguity in policy language, and there are several reasons why insurers seek to avoid arguing, or even intimating, that the language at issue in an insurance policy is ambiguous.

The Court of Appeal of California, Second District, decided that any interests in Superman copyrights or termination rights held by Laura Siegel Larson, daughter of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, were her separate property, rather than community property of her marriage.

As a child, Geoffrey Gerber grabbed comic books out of his dentist's treat bag after checkups. As an intellectual-property partner at Husch Blackwell Sanders, he grabs comic books ' key elements now in a substantial portion of his practice ' out of his litigator's case. 'There's a tremendous amount of comic-book litigation out there,' says Gerber, who practices in St. Louis for the newly merged firm. He adds that comic books, which hit it big in the 1930s as mainstream media, are 'fairly new media' in the scope of entertainment.