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If you asked 100 patent attorneys walking down the street, "What is the PCT for?", the vast majority would answer that the PCT is used to file a U.S. patent application under the Paris Convention to reserve patent rights in many other countries. A minority of them might reply (particularly if they were on a street in New York or Washington), that the PCT is the way their foreign clients bring their own applications into the United States. But very few would answer, "to control the timing and location of my search and the timing and location of my examination for my U.S. patent application."

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The Treasury Department announced on June 18 that it will extend the "make available" provisions of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) through 2005, the third year of the federal Terrorism Risk Insurance Program.

In the last several years, a number of insurance companies including Chubb, AIG, InsureTrust (through Lloyd's of London), Venture Programs, Intellectual Property Risk Management ("IPRM"), and Litigation Risk Management, Inc. ("LRM") have begun offering insurance that pays costs associated with infringement of patents only, or infringement of some combination or all of patents, trademarks, trade dress, copyrights and trade secrets. For purposes of this article we will refer to these polices covering intellectual property as "IP infringement policies." IP infringement policies vary by carrier and property covered. The following descriptions are necessarily general.

Highlights of the latest insurance cases from around the country.

In one of the nation's first and most comprehensive allocation choice-of-law decisions, a court recently rejected insurers' claims that allocation law of the forum applies to property damage arising at multiple environmental sites if the policyholder's coverage action is venued in New Jersey. The decision was rendered in four companion environmental coverage cases involving a common choice-of-law issue. <i>See General Electric Co., as successor in interest to RCA Corp. v. Certain Underwriters at Lloyd's London,</i> Docket No. MER-L-4931-87 c/w MER-L-6432-88 (Law Div. Mar. 25, 2004), <i>reconsid. den.,</i> (Law Div. May 12, 2004) (hereinafter "<i>RCA</i>"); <i>Home Ins. Co. v. Cornell-Dubilier Electronics, Inc.,</i> Docket No. MER- L-5192-96 c/w MER-L-2773-02 (Law Div. Mar. 25, 2004), <i>reconsid. den.,</i> (Law Div. May 12, 2004); <i>Sterling Winthrop, Inc. v. Royal Indem. Ins. Co.</i>, Docket No. MER-L-101-94 c/w MER-L-106-94 (Law Div. Mar. 25, 2004); <i>Rohm &amp; Haas Co. v. Allianz Underwriters, Inc.,</i> Docket No. MER-L-4920-87 c/w MER-L-4664-95 (collectively, the "<i>Companion Cases</i>"). The court concluded that the law of the state in which each waste site is located presumptively applies to the allocation of damages. This decision, now the subject of pending appeals, is likely to reach New Jersey's Supreme Court because it was rendered in "high stakes" cases, and it has broad application to many other environmental coverage actions. If the Supreme Court ultimately takes up the matter ' something the court has demonstrated a willingness to do in connection with other challenging coverage issues (<i>see, eg, Spaulding Composites Co. v. Liberty Mutual Ins. Co.,</i> 176 N.J. 25, 819 A.2d 410 (2003) (granting leave for interlocutory appeal regarding inapplicability of non-cumulation clause); <i>Pfizer, Inc. v. Employers Ins. of Wausau,</i> 154 N.J. 187, 721 A.2d 634 (1998) (granting leave for interlocutory appeal regarding choice-of-law governing interpretation of pollution exclusion); <i>Carter-Wallace v. Admiral Ins. Co.,</i> 154 N.J. 312, 712 A.2d 1116 (1998) (granting interlocutory appeal regarding allocation) ' it will be the highest state court in the nation to resolve an allocation choice-of-law dispute in a multistate, multisite environmental coverage action.

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As any attorney or support staff personnel will tell you, since the advent of affordable scanners and scanning devices, it has become a necessary evil to scan documents in the law office. The problem has always been the OCR'ing (optical character recognition) of those docs! For several years and many iterations and generations, the OCR programs have left a lot to be desired and have helped us to pull out what little hair we have left trying to capture our documents. <br>I have never been too impressed with the several OCR programs that have been available to the legal profession. That is to say not until now. I have finally found what I believe to be the easiest to use, yet the best for recognition OCR program in the marketplace.

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What sets it apart is that Patterns uses the results of concept analysis to organize a set of documents into a structured visual snapshot of the documents and how they relate to one another.

The increasingly familiar category of "Matter Management" is a niche area in the world of legal technology that has attracted more interest from in-house legal departments and their outside law firms in recent years. It's a category with humble beginnings and dynamic changes ' both in terms of the companies that develop the software and in terms of the features enjoyed by the users. <br>This article takes a brief look at the origins and evolution of matter management technology, and then offer a provocative assessment of what the future holds. Ultimately, it challenges members of the legal technology community to think about what will become more important: fancy technology or software that's easy to use?