Frank "Peter" Petrella helped world middleweight champion Jake LaMotta teach actor Robert De Niro how to box for the Academy Award-winning film <i>Raging Bull</i>. Now Petrella's daughter is taking those fight lessons into a different arena ' the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Ninth Circuit federal appeals court Chief Judge Alex Kozinski recently questioned whether federal courts should hear motions to strike under California's "ant-SLAPP" statute. He wrote that the state statute "cuts an ugly gash through" the "integrated program of pre-trial, trial and post-trial procedures" set out in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Many franchise executives spend most, if not all, of their time working in their businesses and their franchise systems. They have few opportunities to get together with other franchise executives and exchange best practice ideas and solutions for their major challenges.

Columns & Departments

The Instrumentality Test For Determining Franchisor Vicarious Liability

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Prompted by a case involving threats made on Facebook, the Third Circuit has ruled the objective-intent standard for assessing threats still stands.

In this day and age, most law firms have a website and use the Internet as a large part of their overall marketing scheme. However, the ethical considerations are plentiful and not always clear-cut. Even if your firm utilizes a Web developer or marketing firm, it is ultimately the lawyer's responsibility to ensure that his or her Internet marketing is compliant with the applicable rules of professional conduct and state law.

Becoming a firm partner has long been the unquestioned goal of most lawyers. But in today's large law firms, with many hundreds of partners, is this still a desirable goal when a given partner's voice may have little influence over the direction of the firm, and when a partner's income is determined by a "compensation committee" that lacks transparency?

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The ability to quickly identify relevant electronically stored information when litigation or regulatory action arises. This challenge has been significantly exacerbated by the arrival of "Big Data." This problem must be addressed holistically and aggressively with a combination of human intelligence, legal process and advanced information retrieval technology. Taken together, this approach represents a "Facts First" intelligence-gathering methodology that allows legal teams to identify, analyze and defensibly reduce ESI volumes.