Call 855-808-4530 or email [email protected] to receive your discount on a new subscription.
The increase in recent years in malpractice claims against lawyers has impacted entertainment attorneys, too. If a malpractice complaint is filed, will the attorney's liability policy cover the suit? Two primary concerns here are whether the attorney has timely notified his or her insurer of a malpractice claim and how to determine the number of malpractice 'claims' for purposes of the insurer's malpractice-coverage obligations.<br>A recent ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin addressed both issues, as well as which state's law should apply in interpreting malpractice policies.
Recent rulings of importance to you and your practice.
New York often serves as a leading venue for concepts in matrimonial law. Although states differ widely on valuation issues such as personal and organizational goodwill, the concept of value to a professional license or degree has a certain amount of differentiation to the marital pot. Matrimonial attorneys need to recognize the valuation theories underscoring arguments of earnings capacity. Depending upon the applicable state's case law, these theories will impact their next case.
Features
Like New Jersey, New York generally does not consider fault when distributing marital assets. (<i>See</i> Strober L: Marital Misconduct and Alimony. <i>The Matrimonial Strategist</i>, November 2006.) However, there are circumstances under which both states will factor in fault.
When a party to a divorce seeks to invalidate a prenuptial agreement, it often is on the grounds of duress/coercion. Two aspects of that claim that seem to be raised most often are that the wife-to-be was pregnant, and the husband-to-be threatened that without a prenuptial agreement there would be no marriage; and/or that the agreement was signed on the eve of the wedding. Recent cases throughout the nation have demonstrated that courts are reluctant to invalidate agreements on these bases. Some examples follow in this article.
Features
It used to be that an employee desiring to steal $2 million from your company would have a hard time doing so unnoticed. Today, that employee can do so undetected while having a casual conversation with you in the office. Unfortunately, in the current environment, the legal system is not forgiving toward companies that take a more relaxed approach with respect to protecting their own sensitive information.
Features
On Sept. 26, the Employee Benefits Security Administration of the Department of Labor (department) issued proposed regulations implementing amendments to ' 404(c) of the Employee Retirement Income Securities Act of 1974, as amended (ERISA).(The proposed regulations are at 29 CFR ' 550.404c-5.) These amendments were made by ' 624 of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (the act) and provide relief to fiduciaries of participant-directed individual account plans where, in the absence of investment directions from a participant, the plan invests such participant's assets in a 'qualified default investment alternative.'
In last month's issue, we discussed the fact that the New York high court upheld a law requiring health plans to offer birth control. We discussed how non-believers are affected, and outlined defence to legislature. This month's article concludes the discussion.
Before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued its recent decisions in the Kentucky River cases, union leaders and activists predicted dire consequences ' potentially stripping millions of workers, especially in the healthcare industry, of their rights to join a union. Unions, which are trying to attract more employees to their ranks, staged rallies and other events to draw attention to these cases. But the decisions did not dramatically redraw the lines for determining which workers are considered supervisors and which are not. Instead, they provided guidance that will be helpful to employers and unions alike in determining the status of workers whose classification falls into the gray area between supervisor and employee. The analysis remains highly fact-specific and appears unlikely to create the dramatic effects predicted.
The decision by the Federal Circuit in <i>Phillips v. AWH Corp.</i>, 415 F.3d 1303 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (en banc) in July 2005 reaffirmed and amplified many of the court's prior decisions addressing various aspects of patent claim construction. In particular, it emphasized the critical role of the specification in determining what the claim means and stated that the specification 'is the single best guide to the meaning of a disputed term.' While the specification provides a number of sign posts or guides to interpreting a claim, one of the most important considerations is whether and how the patentee may have limited the invention to certain embodiments or may have distinguished the invention from prior inventions. It is important, therefore, for both patent prosecutors and litigators to understand how the Federal Circuit has approached the issue of limiting claims in a post-<i>Phillips</i> world based on the embodiments disclosed in the specification.
