In December, U.S. District Judge Stephen Larson of the Central District of California granted Mattel a sweeping injunction that essentially shuts down MGA's Bratz operation. Larson ordered MGA to cease manufacturing, marketing and selling almost every doll in the Bratz line, as well as any ancillary product that makes use of images of those dolls. He also ordered MGA, at its own expense, to deliver all infringing dolls and products to Mattel for impoundment.
The fate of 74 lawyers in Los Angeles was unclear after New York lawyer Marc Dreier was charged in December with $100 million in securities fraud. Dreier, the founder and managing partner of New York firm Dreier LLP, was charged with one count of securities fraud and one count of wire fraud, both of which involve a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Part One of this article addressed judicial and other mechanisms in the United States and China that a patentee can utilize to safeguard evidence under an alleged infringer's control. This second installment continues the discussion of safeguarding evidence in China.
In January 2003, Duane Morris recognized a need to provide a better IP docketing system. The new docketing system needed to be user-friendly and give users the ability to create reports quickly and efficiently. It also needed to provide a flexible solution for incorporating the dockets of lateral hires during the firm's growth cycle and to integrate the firm's nine separate IP docketing databases into a master database. Finally, it was vital that it work well within the firm's existing infrastructure.
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.
