For the past 15 years, the PTO has been issuing patents based on its interpretation of Federal Circuit precedent that a previously unknown DNA sequence that encodes a known polypeptide is non-obvious. This precedent, established by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in In re Bell, and later reaffirmed in In re Deuel, is now being challenged by the Patent Office Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences.
As part of my role as Firm Administrator, productivity lags, as well as bottlenecks and workflow issues concerning flow of information and documents, are all brought to my attention ' sooner or later ' and obviously require swift action. We were faced with a big challenge when we began to rate the efficacy of our existing dictation technology and best practices of delivering dictations.
If you are a U.S.-based IT or litigation support professional, have you ever received an e-mail message that ended like this: "And there are three people in the Munich office"? If you have not, you may very well receive such a message within the next few months. This article provides practical advice for European electronic discovery projects for litigation support and IT professionals.
Legal IT professionals are challenged with finding the most efficient and appropriate e-mail management model while considering the rising cost of e-discovery and ethical issues surrounding e-mail retention. Against this demanding backdrop, firms must determine which of three potential e-mail management strategies to employ: passive, active or a combination of the two.
Highlights of the latest insurance cases from around the country.
This article reviews key notice issues under occurrence-based policies, underscoring how multi-faceted and complex the questions are that can arise when a notice defense is presented. These questions range from what triggers the notice requirement to what the applicable statutory standards are for a notice defense, and from how theories of constructive notice apply to whether there are circumstances where notice will be excused on the basis of excuse or futility.
Many see benzene-related cases as the next big thing in toxic tort litigation.
In a multi-insurer coverage case, it is common for the insured to settle with one or more insurers before trial. When that happens in a case in which the court employs the "all sums" scope-of-coverage approach, can the non-settling insurers bring claims of their own against the settled carriers in an effort to reallocate some of their liability to their former co-defendants? If not, is there another mechanism to account for those settlements?
This article examines the accounting principles and the framework underlying fair value measurements and clarifies the difference between mark-to-market accounting and fair value accounting. The article then examines the application of fair value accounting in inactive or illiquid markets, and in doing so, raises certain thematic issues that have surfaced in regard to this topic.
In just a few hours, a single negative, biting reference about a firm on a single, well-trafficked blog can easily mushroom through viral marketing into widespread hostility or ridicule across the Internet. Here's what to do.
