LJN Newsletters

Two recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decisions illustrate lower courts’ differing approaches to the U.S. Supreme Court’s running rebuke of overly expansive interpretations of the mail and wire fraud statutes.

Stop running pilot after pilot with different tools but failing to move beyond testing. Start with business outcomes. Redesign processes and guardrails. Rethink pricing models. And then, with clarity of purpose, choose the tools that enable the future of legal work.

Most days, preparing and prosecuting patent applications follows a familiar rhythm. Talk with the inventors. Draft the application. Wait for the Patent Office. Argue a few times. Secure the patent. Repeat. But every so often, a case reminds us that our work can mean much more — especially when something has gone wrong, and someone needs an advocate to make it right.

Large law firms rode a strong 2024 on the back of broad demand and aggressive rate growth — but the model is wobbling. Expense pressure is up, realization risk is real, and AI is reshaping how clients assess value. Firms that treat their legal and client experience as structured data (and not as anecdotal story sharing at meetings) will plan faster, pitch smarter, cross-sell wider, bill more, and protect margins when market tailwinds fade.

For forward-thinking real-estate investors, mortgage-default litigation can unlock off-market assets, compress deal timelines, and capture risk-adjusted alpha. Indeed, investors can convert distressed credit into dependable, non-correlated returns. The mechanism for unlocking this value often includes the “hammer” that is foreclosure litigation. But it is not that easy.

Subscription businesses may have breathed a sigh of relief when a federal appeals court blocked the Federal Trade Commission’s “click-to-cancel” rule in July, but legal experts say they should scale back their compliance efforts only modestly, or perhaps not at all.

In 1997, Supertramp members Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, the band’s main songwriters, agreed to share their songwriting and publishing income with the group’s three other members — John Helliwell, Robert Siebenberg and Douglas Thomson — and their personal manager David Margereson. But there was one key point missing in the participation memorandum: The agreement didn’t state how long it would remain in effect. It wasn’t until August 2025 that the issue was decided, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In a recent decision, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey subordinated a 502(h) claim to prevent the claimant from being paid in full prior to investors defrauded by the debtors’ pre-petition operation of a Ponzi scheme. In its decision, the court maintained that the equitable powers of bankruptcy courts were sufficiently broad to subordinate a claim on equitable grounds under Section 510(c) and that there is nothing in the Bankruptcy Code that prevents a court from so doing.