Features

What are the biggest litigation concerns right now in corporate America? What industries face the highest incidence of legal action? How do corporate law departments regard their litigation firms? And by what criteria do general counsel select the firms that litigate on their behalf, and what areas of legal service do they feel need the greatest improvement?

When a lawsuit looms, corporate counsel have traditionally known what to do. They issue a litigation hold, telling company employees to maintain all records related to the disputed matter. <br>Unfortunately, that's not good enough any more. Attorneys can no longer simply issue instructions and leave it up to company employees to comply. <br>Two recent federal court rulings hold companies and their counsel to a higher standard, requiring them to act aggressively and proactively in order to preserve company records. Otherwise, a company that destroys discoverable records can face harsh sanctions for spoliation.

Joel Rose authored last month's <i>A&amp;FP</i> article on how to balance compensation for law firm partners whose strengths lay in origination, production and management. So <i>A&amp;FP</i> sought his reaction to the following thought-provoking quote from Peter C. Lando and Matthew B. Lowrie.

Features

Last month's sidebar article on "profitability levers" invited ' well, predicted ' corrections to my hearsay report on the origin of the RULES acronym for profitability factors: realization, utilization, leverage, expense control, and speed of billing and collection. <br>Joseph A. Bailey of PwC, a textbook coauthor cited in that sidebar and also the coauthor of this month's feature article on globalizing law firm operations, concurs with my source's belief that Bob Arndt was one of the RULES originators.

The June edition introduced numerous accounting-related issues that firms confront when they use foreign currencies. This new article raises additional accounting-related challenges of international compensation and taxation, while also highlighting the broader planning issues associated with a law firm's decision to expand its operations globally.

Descriptive terminology is essential to providing effective patent protection for nanotechnology inventions, particularly from the perspective of future licensing and litigation activities. One of the key difficulties in patenting nanotech inventions, however, arises from the absence of established terminology. Failure to clearly define one's invention can lead to a number of unfortunate consequences, ranging from an overly narrow patent covering a limited scope of subject matter to a vague or overly broad patent susceptible to invalidation. This article will discuss: 1) recent decisions from the Federal Circuit that reveal how the use of descriptive terminology is essential to patenting nanotech inventions effectively, 2) how those decisions pose special problems for nanotech inventions, and 3) how those problems can be addressed through nanotech inventors acting as their own lexicographers and defining key terms in their patent specifications.

Features

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

The European Union ("EU") has once again failed to come to an agreement regarding a single unitary Community patent. At the May 18, 2004 Competitiveness Council meeting, the Council of the European Union ("Council") could not reach a unanimous agreement on the proposal for a Council Regulation on the Community patent. The only outstanding issue that has been a stumbling block all along, <i>ie,</i> languages and translation costs of the patent claims, remained unresolved. The EU's main decision-making body concluded that all conceivable compromise solutions had been tried. Accordingly, it stated its intent to refer the matter to the Presidency of the European Council.