Commercial Law

Legally speaking, a cause of action for a physician's failure to disclose a financial relationship with a drug company or medical device manufacturer may take the form of a medical malpractice case for lack of informed consent or breach of fiduciary duty. This article discusses what physicians can do.

Part One of this article began a discussion of the dramatic increase in cases alleging caregiver discrimination. Part Two herein discusses the most recent cases and guidelines involving this area of the law, and how employers can best protect themselves, given the explosion of family responsibility discrimination (FRD) cases and the open issues that could further impact the number of FRD filings.

Legislation signed last month will allow New Jersey judges to restrict Internet access for convicted sex offenders and make it easier for law enforcement to monitor their online activity.

In the days of only paper documents, smaller companies could afford to wait until they became involved in a lawsuit to worry about pre-trial discovery, but today's reliance on digital information makes that a risky and unnecessarily expensive strategy.

If you use software and work for or with a company subject to Sarbanes-Oxley ('SOX'), then 2007 was an interesting year for you. How interesting? I'll raise some issues arising from the intersection of the topic of software use and SOX from last year to help you keep to a minimum the risk that 2008 will be an interesting year in some very bad ways.

John and Timothy Rigas ('the Rigases') were convicted in 2004 by a federal jury for their roles in looting millions of dollars from Adelphia Communications Co. and for failing to disclose billions of dollars in company liabilities on Adelphia's financial statements. In their appeal to the Second Circuit, the Rigases argued that because their convictions were predicated on Adelphia's accounting for liabilities in its financial statements, the prosecution was required to call an accounting expert to explain the technical aspects of applicable Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The Second Circuit recently affirmed all but one of the counts of convictions. Here is an analysis of the case.

The authors are longtime members of the ABA Section of Taxation Civil and Criminal Tax Penalties Committee. Their thrice-annual Saturday morning meetings used to involve continuing education only among lawyers joined by the common bond of representing clients who were not just aggressive in their tax affairs but who really cheated (or at least were thought to have by the government). For the past few years, though, their sessions have been packed with practitioners who never before cared much about developments in the world of criminal tax law. Here's why.

Given that the raison d'etre of KERPs was to retain top management, it is perhaps ironic that debtors now must show that a compensation plan is not retentive ' or at least that retention is not its primary purpose ' in order to obtain bankruptcy court approval. This article offers a complete explanation and analysis.