LJN Newsletters

The employment lawyer's adage that "no good deed goes unpunished" was thrown into sharp relief by the Sixth Circuit recently when it held that telecommuting ' even when offered to other employees ' is not necessarily a reasonable accommodation for a disabled employee.

Dynamic pricing is the practice of offering different prices to consumers based on various factors designed to maximize sales and profits, which may include the retailer's perception of the willingness of a particular consumer to pay at a given price point. This can be the basis for personalized pricing, the "holy grail" of which is to develop a methodology for "perfect price discrimination" that maximizes the amount each individual consumer is willing to pay.

Tension has focused on whether to allow a secured creditor to improve its position with new property acquired after the bankruptcy case. The result was the broad mandate of Section 552 of the Bankruptcy Code: A prepetition lender with a lien on an asset enjoys a post-petition lien on the proceeds of that asset.

Recent cases advance debate on Franchisor-Franchisee relationships.

The owner of entertainment intellectual property often faces concerns about maximizing licensing revenues while addressing the restrictions of federal and state laws that create those rights. Because a given IP right may involve federal law and state law ' through associated trade secrets or confidential information ' licensing of that IP mix often presents a challenge to maximizing an entertainment IP owner's potential revenue generation.

The authors have analyzed the issues faced in patent licensing and litigation discussions, and have traced backward through the process to suggest strategies that prosecution counsel might apply early in the process to influence their clients' ultimate ability to monetize patents through litigation or other means.

Cloud-based services have exploded in popularity over the last decade due to their ability to provide the convenience of on-demand resources along with generating efficiencies. However, given the importance of IT to most modern entities' operations, companies must balance the benefits of such outsourced cloud services with the risks associated with entrusting data and critical business processes to third parties.

With many companies wearing the hats of the supplier, partner and customer simultaneously, the dynamics of vendor contracts, customer agreements, licenses, trademarks, leases, warranties and other contracts become ever more convoluted.