Many global firms that provide transaction support services for law firms are exceedingly worried about the 2008 deal season. But is the anecdotal evidence of a drying pipeline true? A quick look at the data suggests that law and accounting firms are right to be worried about a decreased deal flow, with only a few highlights in sight.
This article is the first in a series about developing a customized scorecard for your firm's partners, specific information to include in the scorecard, tailoring it to your firm's goals, and getting partners to understand the scorecard and achieve greater success.
Corporate counsel are exercising increased bargaining power about fees and terms of employment of outside law firms. Law firms can no longer ignore the competition of the marketplace when establishing billing rates and fees. Several variations and combinations of three basic billing systems, hourly billing, fixed fee billing and contingent fee billing, follow.
Recent news and rulings of importance to your practice.
In a recent decision, the NLRB, in a 3-2 decision split along Republican/Democrat lines, held that one company's Communications Systems Policy was lawful on its face, and that the employer's discipline based on the two e-mails soliciting support for union positions was lawful, but that the disciplinary action based on the purely informative e-mail was unlawful. What does this portend?
The SEC's Securities Offering Reform dramatically changed the landscape of registered public offerings. Issuers and underwriters would do well to take advantage of these changes while staying aware of potential fraud liability. Here's an explanation.
Most employees know that their bosses are usually within their rights snooping on workers' e-mail, but text messaging has been in murkier territory. A federal appeals court sought to clarify matters in a ruling last month by distinguishing between electronic communication that employers store on their servers, or pay someone to store, and communication that is contracted out to third parties.
The Supreme Court on June 9 breathed new life into the doctrine of patent exhaustion -- thereby limiting the power of patent-holders over "downstream" transactions. In a unanimous ruling authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court stood firm behind the 150-year-old doctrine under which "the sale of a patented item terminates all patent rights to that item."
Part One of this article identified two reasons why it is worthwhile to obtain U.S. patents. This second installment continues the discussion with five additional reasons.
Patent infringement litigation based on an Abbreviated New Drug Application ('ANDA') presents certain unique challenges to the discovery process. Unlike ordinary patent litigation, little if any information helpful to the patent owner is publicly available. Instead, the patent owner must rely on a well thought out discovery plan to obtain certain information from the ANDA applicant. Suggestions for designing such a plan are presented below.
