Last year was explosive for the electronic discovery industry. From enormous jury verdicts to proposed changes in the federal rules, the legal and business landscape for e-discovery has never been more in flux. While more e-discovery vendors have entered the market this year, mergers have also consolidated the industry like never before. Meanwhile, case law continues to grow to include not just the very well publicized sanctions cases, but also opinions that have honed in on some of the technical challenges of e-discovery.

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Highlights of the latest insurance cases from around the country.

Liability insurance policies apply where the insured is liable for bodily injury, property damage, or wrongful acts (depending on the policy). What happens, however, when the policyholder denies that any injury or wrongdoing took place? Does that mean that insurance is not applicable?

The role of the trial judge in screening proffered custom and usage evidence has evolved with time and is now part of the gate-keeping function provided in the federal rules of evidence. This article traces some of the relevant background and discusses how the federal rules now guide the courts in the exercise of that function.

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Debtors facing mass-tort asbestos liability frequently challenge their insurers' standing to appear in the debtors' bankruptcy cases. They typically argue that their insurers have no standing because the proposed bankruptcy plan is "insurance neutral." Debtors contend alternatively that the insurers' standing is limited to specific issues directly affecting the insurance contract, such as whether the debtor may assign policy proceeds notwithstanding anti-assignment provisions contained in the policy. Despite insurers' strong incentives to participate in mass-tort bankruptcies, bankruptcy courts have frequently been willing to suppress insurer objections that the debtor finds inconvenient.

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One of the major issues for the past quarter century in the litigation of coverage disputes relating to liability for alleged long-term or latent injury or damage (such as those arising from asbestos bodily injury, environmental property damage, or other mass torts) has been "allocation." In particular, insurance companies and policyholders have disputed the scope of coverage provided by an "occurrence"-based general liability policy triggered by injury or damage during its policy period, when the same occurrence also caused harm in other policy periods.

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Software developers invest a great deal of time and effort developing complex code that performs unique functionality for which there is a viable market. These software developers typically offer software licenses that only license object code, <i>ie</i>, the code that can be read by a machine, rather than the source code, <i>ie</i>, code that can be deciphered and read by a person.

In an important decision interpreting the fair use provision of the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. &sect;107), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently held that downloading full copies of copyrighted material without compensation to authors cannot be deemed "fair use." In <i>BMG Music v. Gonzalez</i>, 430 F.3d 888 (7th Cir. 2005), Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, rejected the defendant's argument that she was immune from liability because she was merely sampling songs that she had downloaded from the KaZaA file-sharing network on a "try-before-you-buy basis."