LJN Newsletters

Dwelling on your "message" (or what you want to say) at the onset of any reporter's inquiry, or at any point during the reporting process to the exclusion of all of the other component parts of the reporter/source/communications professional interaction (deadlines, non-verbal cues, relationships, etc.), is sure to result in less than optimal coverage. This can only be described as "overmessaging" or "over-PRing" a situation.

In today's world, corporations live and die by the success of their brands. Unfortunately, the world of law remains remarkably detached from what is essentially the lifeblood of the majority of industries. It is often difficult to differentiate one top-tier law firm from another, which is in sharp contrast from the marketing efforts of other service sectors such as accounting, management consulting or investment banking. Branding is essential to business development, regardless of industry sector.

For more than 135 years, attorneys have relied on the LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory to provide them with authoritative information on the worldwide legal profession. Martindale-Hubbell's exclusive Peer Review Lawyer Rating System evaluates attorneys and law firms in the U.S. and Canada with its independent peer review process.

Is it possible that your firm has gone as far as it can with its present approaches to client feedback ' that is, surveys conducted either by written/Web questionnaires, by telephone interviews or by in-person interviews? Has the value received reached a plateau and are you now experiencing diminishing returns? If so, isn't now the time for your firm to be exploring ways to take client feedback to the next level ' especially with the firm's largest and most valued clients?

Well it's a new year and I am hoping that it will be an exciting one. This year in addition to the MLF 50, which is open to firms of 100 attorneys or more,…

Antitrust law has long prohibited producers with market power from engaging in tying arrangements, agreements in which the sale of a highly desired "tying" product is conditioned on the purchase of a second item. The Supreme Court has held that sellers must exert power over the marketplace to be guilty of illegal tying under the Sherman Act. Does the existence of a patent on a product create a presumption of market power? On June 20, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Illinois Tool Works Inc. v. Independent Ink, Inc., 2005 WL 770269, *1 (U.S.) (2005) to consider this question.

Highlights of the latest intellectual property news from around the country.

A trademark identifies the source of a particular good or service, and trademark law seeks to protect against a third party's use of a mark that "is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive" as to source. 15 U.S.C. '1114(1). That is, certain aspects of trademark law "preven[t] producers from free-riding on their rivals' marks." New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, Inc., 971 F.2d 302, 305, (9th Cir. 1992).