Commercial Law

Nanotechnology financiers were biting their nails this past October as market forces were engaged by regulatory forces. In the same week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ('FDA') held its first full public meeting on nanotechnology safety and environmental risk, and the Environmental Protection Agency ('EPA') placed a Notice of Rulemaking regarding nanotech product commercial release requirements in the Congressional Record. Investors see only risk — each of the two agencies has the power to shut down the evolving nanotechnology industry.

Although online blogging has gone mainstream in some professions, there's one group of people mostly absent from the blogosphere: the in-house bar. That said, a few in-house blogs do exist, and their numbers are growing steadily.

Today, the pervasive role that technology has assumed in business and legal practice, as more and more of our daily lives are lived online, provides a more fundamental challenge to how attorneys practice business law. In an age when 'paper file' has become an anachronism and an oxymoron, business law and the way it is practiced have required more than just tinkering with particular rules.

Recent cases in e-commerce law and in the e-commerce industry.

A law firm Web site is an interactive experience ' one that takes place between someone in need of information and someone in the position to provide that information.The total experience a client or prospective client has while visiting a Web site reflects on your firm. A bad experience forms a bad association. A good experience creates a good one.

Business development in the legal community is a science, but it requires the creativity of an artist. That artistry can be demonstrated most powerfully through the written word, a tool of great lawyers for centuries. Encapsulating an interesting case or complex transaction into 500 or 1000 words for the benefit of colleagues and the business community at large is the single best way to demonstrate expertise on a macro scale. It is at the very core of client generation.

Gray-haired, older, or as I shall refer to them, senior partners, as a class, represent a challenge that most managing partners find vexing. Many firms have avoided addressing this very complex issue either because of the emotional reaction it invokes, or because they just don't see it as a real problem yet. Others have adopted the apparently simple solution of setting a mandatory retirement age at which the partner is expected to stop practicing and head for a retirement community.

A commercial real estate attorney representing a client that needs title insurance in a commercial real estate transaction must consider which endorsements would be best to provide the client with all the necessary title insurance protection. This two-part article addresses which American Land Title Association ('ALTA') endorsements are typical when representing a buyer, tenant, or lender in an acquisition or lease of commercial property. In addition, the article discusses a few non-ALTA endorsements that are available in many states.