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.
Features
Tip for Investors: Don't Lock Out Unionized Targets
Both financial and strategic investors often instinctively reject the idea of acquiring unionized companies. This can be a mistake. Healthy, unionized enterprises can turn out to be excellent investments. The key is analyzing them correctly.
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