LJN Newsletters

A recent Massachusetts Appeals Court ruling enforcing an e-mail settlement agreement of a contractual dispute is a reminder to lawyers that e-mail settlements carry the same weight as deals on paper.

In the current litigious environment, what happens when an employee sends personal, allegedly confidential communications from work to his or her attorney or spouse? Can the employer lawfully access those e-mails, or do the attorney-client and marital privileges prohibit the employer from doing so? In answering this question, the key inquiry is always whether the employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the e-mails at issue.

The RIAA has filed thousands of legal actions since its campaign against unauthorized file sharers began in 2003. For the past two years, Holme Roberts & Owen ('HRO'), based in Denver, CO, has served as national coordinating counsel for these cases. Late last year, the first trial against a file-sharer resulted in a jury in Duluth, MN, finding the defendant liable for willful infringement and awarding the record company plaintiffs $222,000. HRO partner Richard L. Gabriel is the record industry's lead counsel in that case and in its national campaign. He recently gave an update on the Duluth case and the industry's legal efforts against file sharing in a discussion at his office with Stan Soocher, Associate Professor of Music & Entertainment Industry Studies at the University of Colorado Denver and Editor-in-Chief of Internet Law & Strategy's sibling newsletter Entertainment Law & Finance.

In the days of only paper documents, smaller companies could afford to wait until they became involved in a lawsuit to worry about pre-trial discovery, but today's reliance on digital information makes that a risky and unnecessarily expensive strategy.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the road to legal sanctions can be paved with intentions to show good faith. That's particularly true when it comes to implementing a legal hold process. Companies with lawsuits on the horizon must be extremely careful with the technology they use and the processes they follow regarding e-discovery in order to avoid sanctions and maintain defensibility.

The 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ('FRCP') were anticipated by some corporate counsel with Y2K-like gloom and doom predictions. In particular, many wondered aloud whether the rules would have the effect of placing reasonable limits on electronic discovery, or whether instead they would open the floodgates and drown us all in a sea of electronic document production. However, the past year has shown that, like the Y2K hysteria that went out with a whimper, the fretting over the negative impact of the amendments may have been overblown.

Recent cases in e-commerce law and in the e-commerce industry.

If you use software and work for or with a company subject to Sarbanes-Oxley ('SOX'), then 2007 was an interesting year for you. How interesting? I'll raise some issues arising from the intersection of the topic of software use and SOX from last year to help you keep to a minimum the risk that 2008 will be an interesting year in some very bad ways.