In 2009, the online policies of Sears, Overstock.com and Blockbuster each came up short. Alarmingly, there was nothing atypical about the terms, conditions or disclaimers these Web sites used, or the manner in which the policies were presented to and accepted by online users. The lessons learned from these companies' troubles are that material information should be disclosed more prominently and online visitors should affirmatively accept the terms. If your company's online policies have not been re-examined in the last year, now is the time to do so.

Who remembers the practice of law before e-mail and computers? I do. In those "good old days," bar association activities, law clubs, and Martindale-Hubbell were about as adventurous as many attorneys would become when it came to social networking. Today, sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are used by lawyers of all ages, and not merely for socializing purposes.

I am now hearing murmurs that blogs are dead ' or at least dying ' within the legal profession. The universe of blogs has become too crowded, too noisy, and too cluttered with spam to have any value, some say. Services such as Twitter and Facebook are easier, more direct and more personal, they contend. So I come today to declare blogging alive, well and thriving within the legal profession.

In recent years, a growing debate has emerged over whether the overall look and feel of a Web site can be protected. To be sure, online content, videos, and other media are copyrightable, but the law remains unsettled when it comes to using trademark law to protect a site's distinctive interface and design elements. This article discusses trade dress generally, the issue of copyright preemption, and recent decisions that have wrestled with the issue of Web site trade dress infringement.

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Features

Highlights of the latest insurance cases from around the country.

After taking a closer look at <i>Appalachian Insurance Co. v. General Electric Co.</i>, 8 N.Y.3d 162 (2007), this article surveys four recent New York decisions that interpret "occurrence" definitions and grouping language in policies to address the number-of-occurrences issue.

Features

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi recently addressed whether an insurer's duty to defend and indemnify its insured under a claims-made policy for law enforcement wrongful actions covers allegations arising from the murder of two teenagers during civil rights unrest in 1964; the primary issues involved coverage in the presence of both covered and uncovered claims and the application of the known-loss exclusion.