LJN Newsletters

When is an executory contract not just an executory contract? When it's also a regulation, of course. So ruled Judge Richard Casey of the District Court for the Southern District of New York in In re Calpine, 337 B.R. 27 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 27, 2006), dismissing Calpine's request for authority to reject under 11 U.S.C. ' 365 certain regulated wholesale power supply contracts that fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of a federal administrative agency. Casey's decision and the subsequent appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case is currently pending, culminate a 3-month legal sprint through the executive and judicial branches of government in a case that pits the authority of the judiciary against the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ' the administrative agency tasked with regulating the wholesale sale and transmission of electric power.

With the implementation of Legal Files, we have successfully consolidated case information, provided better case-management reporting, and enabled our lawyers to manage their cases more cost effectively and efficiently. Through the use of Legal Files, we can successfully manage multi-district litigation (MDL), gather expert information, categorize, associate and manage groupware items (e-mails, calendar events, and tasks), maintain matter-centric documents, manage deposition and evidentiary documents and produce dynamic reports for overall management of cases.

Think back just 6 or 7 years to the approaching end of the millennium. If the woes of Y2K planning held the primary focus for IT leaders and litigation support professionals alike, the lofty promises about how to become an 'instant ASP' and 'deliver applications, with unmatched levels of security, speed, and availability, in a fully managed and integrated environment' ran a close second.
Although it took a bit longer than the optimists originally forecast, the 'buzz' from the 1990s ' the promise of more affordable, more accessible, on-demand software delivery (paying others to host, maintain, and upgrade applications under an umbrella of guaranteed uptime) continues to gain market acceptance, now under a new name, 'Software as a Service' (SaaS).

Employers frequently enter into employment agreements with their employees for a fixed period of time at a stated annual salary. What happens if, at the end of such an agreement's term, both parties continue to perform under the expired employment agreement as if the agreement were still in effect?

When someone becomes an equity partner in a law firm, he or she becomes an owner of an institution that has a substantial value ' certainly greater value than is demonstrated on a cash basis balance sheet. Yet the majority of U.S. law firms admit partners with little or no requirement that they make a purchase of the firm's capital assets.

Companywide layoffs don't immunize an employer from age discrimination suits The Third Circuit has ruled that where an employee is able to demonstrate 'implausibilities and inconsistencies' in an employer's justification for his or her layoff, the employer is not entitled to summary judgment in an age discrimination suit, even if the plaintiff's layoff resulted from an overall reduction in force (RIF) and the employer was able to identify certain 'age neutral' determination criteria. Tomasso v. The…

When Judge Scheindlin ruled in a landmark case and made the statement 'that's going to be the most expensive curse word you ever said,' little did she realize the prophetic nature of her words. I am not sure whether Judge Scheindlin knew how 'codified' her electronic discovery rulings would become when she issued her opinions (five times, no less in Zubulake v. UBS Warburg). She probably could not have foreseen the resulting cost and risk impact on corporations faced with defending lawsuits containing (as part of the pool of potential evidence) large volumes of electronically stored information (ESI).
We are now at the brink of the 'codification.' The (amended) Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (where the Zubulake standards are extremely influential) governing electronic discovery will go into effect in December 2006.

The United States Supreme Court's recent decision in Illinois Tools Works v. Independent Ink reversed almost 50 years of precedent holding that the owner of a patent was presumed to have market power in patent-related tying cases brought under the Sherman Act. The Court noted that Congressional amendments to the patent code explicitly finding that tying was not a per se patent misuse, coupled by the widely accepted view in academia that patents did not inherently lead to market power, had so eroded the legal doctrine supporting the presumption of market power in patent-related tying cases, that a new rule was appropriate. The Court held that in all future tying cases, the plaintiff must allege and prove that the defendant has actual market power in the tying product ' the mere existence of a patent is no longer sufficient.