Many companies have taken lessons from catastrophic events such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and developed business-continuity plans to protect their people and assets and to restore operations as quickly as possible. While these plans are instrumental in restoring a company's operations, many miss an important aspect of any continuity plan — the programs and protocols that must be in place to prove losses related to the incident and recover funds from an insurance company.
Your insurance company is insolvent. Now what? Your state guaranty fund may provide some relief, but is it worth pursuing? As explored in this article, that depends.
Whether a D&O policy will afford coverage for the litigation resulting from the collapse of the subprime mortgage lending industry is yet to be seen. As discussed in this article, there are several policy provisions that are likely to be relevant in the subprime context.
Part One of this series discussed the history of licensing and the need to prove infringement. This month's installment addresses patent trolls and the rise of the Asian IP powerhouse.
The worldwide patenting landscape is undergoing slow but inevitable tectonic shifts. During the first half of this century, the oligopoly of the United States, Europe, and Japan as the source of the vast majority of new ideas will be broken with the rise of innovation concentrated in other nations beyond the Trilateral, as the USPTO, EPO, and JPO are known.
Nothing is as important to the success of a law firm as strong leadership at the top. Yet, in far too many firms, the partners are still reluctant to give anyone the CEO authority needed for effective management and leadership.
“Baseball arbitration” refers to the process used in Major League Baseball in which if an eligible player's representative and the club ownership cannot reach a compensation agreement through negotiation, each party enters a final submission and during a formal hearing each side — player and management — presents its case and then the designated panel of arbitrators chooses one of the salary bids with no other result being allowed. This method has become increasingly popular even beyond the sport of baseball.
Insiders (and others) in the private equity business are accustomed to seeing a good deal of discussion ' academic and trade ' on the question of the appropriate methods of valuing private equity positions and securities which are otherwise illiquid. An interesting recent decision in the Southern District has been brought to our attention. The case is <i>In Re Allied Capital Corp.</i>, CCH Fed. SEC L. Rep. 92411 (US DC, S.D.N.Y., Apr. 25, 2003). Judge Lynch's decision is well written, the Judge reviewing a motion to dismiss by a business development company, Allied Capital, against a strike suit claiming that Allied's method of valuing its portfolio failed adequately to account for i) conditions at the companies themselves and ii) market conditions. The complaint appears to be, as is often the case, slap dash, content to point out that Allied revalued some of its positions, marking them down for a variety of reasons, and the stock price went down - all this, in the view of plaintiff's counsel, amounting to violations of Rule 10b-5.
The DOJ's Criminal Division issued three declinations since the issuance of the revised CEP a year ago. Review of these cases gives insight into DOJ's implementation of the new policy in practice.
There is no efficient market for the sale of bankruptcy assets. Inefficient markets yield a transactional drag, potentially dampening the ability of debtors and trustees to maximize value for creditors. This article identifies ways in which investors may more easily discover bankruptcy asset sales.
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.
