LJN Newsletters

With ever widening budget deficits and economic limitations on raising taxes, the IRS will go in the only direction it can, that is, to mine the "tax gap" ' the difference between the taxes that should have been collected under current law and those that actually are collected.

As the financial crisis has deepened, the pressure for prosecutions from politicians, the media and the public has grown. In turn, federal and state law enforcement and regulatory agencies have devoted vast resources to investigating the crisis.

The combination of new people, priorities, resources and coordination ' coupled with public and Congressional outrage ' promises to bring a surge of white-collar enforcement, but perhaps accompanied by some sanity in sentencing.

The Bankruptcy Code ' 362(d)(3) provides unique grounds for stay relief by permitting a creditor secured by a bankruptcy debtor's "single asset real estate" to pursue an act against the property as early as 90 days after the case's filing. To take full advantage of this provision, however, secured creditors should carefully manage the dual time frames set forth in this Bankruptcy Code section.

A recent study found that companies filing for bankruptcy protection were three times more likely than non-bankrupt companies to face enforcement action by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) relating to alleged financial statement fraud.

Recently, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower courts' rulings that a public company was an insider of another non-affiliated public company and was therefore required to return a $188.2 million payment made over four months before the debtor's bankruptcy filing. This decision, illustrates how critical it is for lenders and vendors to conform their conduct toward troubled companies so as to reduce their risk of being deemed non-statutory insiders.

In the constantly evolving world of e-commerce, legal contracts may be no more credible than tidbits found in the muck of online fact, fiction and plain nonsense that make sites such as Snopes.com so vital to separating Internet reality from Internet fraud. The truth is that no matter how well an attorney writes a contract, or Web site terms and conditions, another attorney can usually find a way to attack what the first one wrote.

A recently filed music copyright suit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ' Satriani v. Martin, ' has revealed a new and unexpected application for the Web, namely, its potential as a forum for infringement analysis by amateur musicologists. Long before any party to this litigation will be required to submit expert reports or summary judgment briefs, YouTube postings have offered remarkably insightful analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the parties' respective cases.