Features
Guide To Escheating Outstanding Trust Fund Checks
Escheatment laws are voluminous and could appear to be unrealistic to keep up with; however, knowing that they are there can spare you from an unwelcomed unclaimed property audit.
Features
Anchoring the Firm Culture In Solid Rock
Over the years of my consulting practice, I have seen many formerly great law firms fail and go under. The reason? They lost the anchor to their core values, and then started drifting into issues and concerns that eventually destroyed them from within. Herein, I try to lay out what can be done to keep the anchor holding.
Features
How to Minimize Violence in Your Workplace
I am a management safety and health lawyer. For the first 30 years of my practice, I provided counsel to employers in hundreds of cases involving serious injuries. Twenty-four of those cases involved fatalities. None involved workplace violence. In the last five years, however, clients have increasingly sought my assistance with employee-on-employee violence issues.
Features
Take Care in Using Consumer Data to Drive Dynamic Pricing of e-Commerce
Dynamic pricing is the practice of offering different prices to consumers based on various factors designed to maximize sales and profits, which may include the retailer's perception of the willingness of a particular consumer to pay at a given price point. This can be the basis for personalized pricing, the "holy grail" of which is to develop a methodology for "perfect price discrimination" that maximizes the amount each individual consumer is willing to pay.
Columns & Departments
Court Watch
Recent cases advance debate on Franchisor-Franchisee relationships.
Features
Awaiting Supreme Court's Ruling on Hybrid Licenses
The owner of entertainment intellectual property often faces concerns about maximizing licensing revenues while addressing the restrictions of federal and state laws that create those rights. Because a given IP right may involve federal law and state law ' through associated trade secrets or confidential information ' licensing of that IP mix often presents a challenge to maximizing an entertainment IP owner's potential revenue generation.
Features
Cloud Computing Agreements
Cloud-based services have exploded in popularity over the last decade due to their ability to provide the convenience of on-demand resources along with generating efficiencies. However, given the importance of IT to most modern entities' operations, companies must balance the benefits of such outsourced cloud services with the risks associated with entrusting data and critical business processes to third parties.
Features
A Primer on What 'Big Data' Is All About
In May 2015, the streaming music service Pandora acquired the music industry data collection company Next Big Sound, which extensively tracks sales, social and streaming data. In the Internet era, the entertainment and other industries are awash with data, all of it with varying degrees of copyright protection. The Pandora/Next Big Sound deal presents a good moment for a primer on this copyright protection.
Features
What ERP Can Teach About ELM Adoption
Following in the footsteps of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) holds out the potential to link risk and legal data to enable the global enterprise to proactively mitigate legal risk, streamline the legal process, and make insightful decisions in response to market or regulatory changes.
Features
Using a Service Mark In Commerce
The Federal Circuit has now ruled that advertising a service that the applicant intends to provide in the future, but is not actually providing on the date of the application, is not "use in commerce." Thus, advertising submitted to the USPTO with a use-based application as a specimen of use of the mark in commerce, must relate to existing services already being provided to customers.
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- Protecting Innovation in the Cyber World from Patent TrollsWith trillions of dollars to keep watch over, the last thing we need is the distraction of costly litigation brought on by patent assertion entities (PAEs or "patent trolls"), companies that don't make any products but instead seek royalties by asserting their patents against those who do make products.Read More ›
- Private Equity Valuation: A Significant DecisionInsiders (and others) in the private equity business are accustomed to seeing a good deal of discussion ' academic and trade ' on the question of the appropriate methods of valuing private equity positions and securities which are otherwise illiquid. An interesting recent decision in the Southern District has been brought to our attention. The case is <i>In Re Allied Capital Corp.</i>, CCH Fed. SEC L. Rep. 92411 (US DC, S.D.N.Y., Apr. 25, 2003). Judge Lynch's decision is well written, the Judge reviewing a motion to dismiss by a business development company, Allied Capital, against a strike suit claiming that Allied's method of valuing its portfolio failed adequately to account for i) conditions at the companies themselves and ii) market conditions. The complaint appears to be, as is often the case, slap dash, content to point out that Allied revalued some of its positions, marking them down for a variety of reasons, and the stock price went down - all this, in the view of plaintiff's counsel, amounting to violations of Rule 10b-5.Read More ›
- Meet the Lawyer Working on Inclusion Rider LanguageAt the Oscars in March, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand made “inclusion rider” go viral. But Kalpana Kotagal, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll had already worked for months to write the language for such provisions. Kotagal was developing legal language for contract provisions that Hollywood's elite could use to require studios and other partners to employ diverse workers on set.Read More ›
- Use of Deferred Prosecution Agreements In White Collar InvestigationsThis article discusses the practical and policy reasons for the use of DPAs and NPAs in white-collar criminal investigations, and considers the NDAA's new reporting provision and its relationship with other efforts to enhance transparency in DOJ decision-making.Read More ›
- The DOJ Goes Phishing: The Rise of False Claims Act Cybersecurity LitigationWhile the DOJ Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative is still in its early stages and cybersecurity regulations are evolving, whistleblower plaintiffs have already begun leveraging the FCA to pursue alleged noncompliance with government cybersecurity requirements.Read More ›