Litigation

Features

A founding partner of one of L.A.'s few remaining litigation boutiques has jumped to Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton's Century City office. Entertainment litigator James Curry took his name off the door of White O'Connor Curry, a Century City firm that spun off of what is now Christensen, Glaser, Fink, Jacobs, Weil & Shapiro in an acrimonious split more than a decade ago.

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A robust local film industry has kept American films on the margins in India. Foreign films account for only 3% of the market in India, compared to European countries, where American movies account for between 70% and 95% of films shown. So if the United States wants to make a point about film piracy in India, it needs to show Indians that piracy hits the market for their own films, not just those of foreign companies.

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When their 15 minutes of fame came, two Santa Barbara County prosecutors didn't shy away ' one authored a book based loosely on a rape case she was handling and the other consulted on a movie about an alleged killer he was trying to bring to justice. But their foray into the entertainment world went awry in October 2006 when a state appellate panel threw both prosecutors off their cases. Joyce Dudley's novel, 'Intoxicating Agent,' hewed far too close to her real-world rape case, the court held, while Ronald Zonen shouldn't have allowed producers of the movie 'Alpha Dog' access to highly sensitive files in his sensational death-penalty case. As a result, the court ruled, keeping the prosecutors on the cases would deny both criminal defendants a fair trial.

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More than 40 sanctions cases ' resulting in millions of dollars in fines ' have been decided in one year since revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ('FRCP') took effect. In contrast, only two have been recorded under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act since it was put into place in 2002. The 2006 changes to the FRCP specifically require that companies ensure all potentially relevant electronically stored information ('ESI') associated with litigation is preserved and protected, with a subset ultimately produced when required. While on the surface this may sound simple, those in the trenches on both sides ' legal and IT ' have war stories to tell of hard lessons learned. Organizations that do not take a comprehensive approach to managing ESI for discovery may fall prey to fines, sanctions and worse.

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In <i>Rico v. Mitsubishi Motors Corp.</i>, the California Supreme Court adopted the 'fair and reasonable approach' originally formulated by the Second District Court of Appeal in <i>State Compensation Ins. Fund v. WPS, Inc.</i>, and set forth the duties of attorneys upon receiving inadvertent disclosures.

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Plaintiffs' counsel recently have been changing their tactics in product liability class action litigation. In place of filing traditional injury class actions, they instead have been filing more and more economic 'no-injury' class actions, in which the proposed class members seek to recover not for personal injury, but for their alleged economic losses in purchasing a product that is worth 'less' than they paid for it because of some alleged defect.

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Those who download music to their computers now have two unlikely heroes: Janet Bond Arterton, a federal judge who sits in New Haven, CT; and Christopher David Brennan, a young Waterford, CT, resident who has reportedly downloaded songs by Billy Joel, Hootie and the Blowfish and other artists. Brennan is one of about 30,000 people sued by the music industry in recent years for allegedly taking music from the Internet without paying for it.

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Recent happenings that may affect your practice.