It's time to take a leap and leave behind your firm's entrenched identity as a legal services provider: to succeed, you must start thinking of your firm as a media company.
Taking a page from the Federal Circuit's own analysis of the issue, we will examine the who, what, when, where (and why) of the decision in <i>Exergen Corporation v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.</i>
Less than two months before the Supreme Court is scheduled to review the Federal Circuit's <i>en banc</i> decision in <i>In re Bilski</i> that found Bilski's business method claims unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101, the Federal Circuit held in <i>Prometheus Labs., Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Servs.</i> (Fed. Cir. 2009) that claims to a diagnostic method are patent-eligible subject matter. The Federal Circuit reversed the district court's decision and held that Prometheus' personalized medicine claims satisfied the machine or transformation test set out in <i>Bilski</i>.
Attendees at the 32nd Annual ABA Forum on Franchising were given a timely reminder of the importance of relationships in franchising during a keynote presentation by Greg Nathan, managing director of the Franchise Relationships Institute (Brisbane, Australia).
Bloggers of the world, relax ' the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") is not out to get you. That was the message from Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Regular readers of blogs and other Internet-based sources of news and information know it's not unusual to see product reviews in these virtual venues. While the reviews sometimes appear to be careful, impartial journalism, other times the writer seems just a bit too enthusiastic about the post's subject matter. Of course, readers have good reasons to question just how impartial the authors of these reviews might be.
At 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.
With 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.
The legal implications of branding generally arise initially for companies during the process of selecting a company name and any initial product or service names. For drug development companies, however, careful consideration should also be paid to the implications of branding a clinical trial.
'Disconnect Between In-House and Outside Counsel is a continuation of the discussion of client expectations and the disconnect that often occurs. And although the outside attorneys should be pursuing how inside-counsel actually think, inside counsel should make an effort to impart this information without waiting to be asked.
