A timely and properly drafted “pre-negotiation agreement” should ensure that all discussions or draft agreements exchanged between the parties are neither enforceable prior to final execution of a settlement agreement nor admissible in any court proceeding.
In 2019, the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act/RPAPL §993 (the UPHPA) reshaped the rights of co-owners of inherited property in New York, replacing the traditional, sale-favoring partition system with a multi-layered process designed to limit the right to seek partition and to prioritize family ownership. The Second Department’s sweeping decision confirms that the partition landscape has drastically changed.
In a decision of first impression, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois imposed sanctions on a debtor’s counsel and his law firm for filing a brief that included fabricated citations to case law and nonexistent quotations that were generated by AI.
Over the last decade, technology-assisted review (TAR) has become a preferred choice in the e-discovery toolkit. Now, as generative AI gains traction, legal teams face a new challenge: creating a technology stack that offers the best balance of efficiency, cost and usability.
In today’s world, artificial intelligence is reshaping how journalists, businesses and, most importantly, your clients discover and trust brands. If your content and expertise aren’t showing up in AI-generated responses, you may be invisible in the very moments that matter most.
Technology infrastructure now defines how law firms deliver service, manage compliance, and compete for clients. The most forward-looking firms are not just upgrading systems; they are transforming how they plan, finance, and govern their technology investments.
The patent world is at a moment of change. A tremendous amount of thought, financial investment, and political capital is being devoted to transforming patents into assets that are central to the economy, international trade, and national defense. The incentives for obtaining and aggressively monetizing patents are increasing. In contrast, defending a patent litigation is becoming more difficult and the stakes are higher. Companies that take steps now to navigate these changes may be rewarded with significant competitive advantages.
Since enactment of the Bankruptcy Code, certain types of claims continue to be vigorously litigated, perhaps because adjudication requires a fact-intensive analysis by the court. In the commercial real estate sector, such examples include landlord-tenant commercial real estate lease claims and the disposition of environmental cleanup claims under state and federal law.
Many single asset real estate (SARE) bankruptcies will check some or all of the boxes for a bad faith filing. The timing of a SARE filing commonly suggests an intent to delay, as SARE filings are generally a last resort to stay foreclosure. Nevertheless, courts may be reluctant to dispose of these cases as bad faith filings, absent particularly egregious circumstances evidencing patent abuse of the bankruptcy process.
This year has seen a wave of proposed bills in state legislatures across the United States aimed at regulating foreign-influenced political activity at the state level. While stylized to mirror portions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), in reality, many of these laws are broader than FARA and lack the core exemptions that companies may have grown accustomed to relying upon.
