How often do we hear that "everybody sues" in the United States, and that there are "jackpot juries" handing out huge sums of money to undeserving plaintiffs? Is the media to blame for these skewed beliefs or is the media accurate in its portrayal of the tort system, especially the medical malpractice system?
There have been a spate of reports the last few months on alternative fee agreements, or AFAs as they are also known. Subsequently these have stirred a tremendous amount of conversation in the industry.
I-9 enforcement actions have become a lucrative and successful form of agency action and therefore are not likely to subside. Employers should take this hidden area of liability and turn it into a strength through concerted attention and the skillful implementation of measures like those described in this article.
The year 2012 was another banner year for Department of Justice (DOJ) officials charged with prosecuting corporate enforcement actions. The DOJ recovered $4.9 billion from False Claims Act cases, the most ever in a single year.
What a recent Supreme Court decision does is to effectively immunize pharmaceutical generics manufacturers from state tort liability when they use FDA-approved labels for their products deemed equivalent to brand-name FDA-approved drugs.
Family law judges and lawyers need to be aware that in assigning the dependency exemption to a non-custodial parent, Form 8332 releasing the exemption must be secured from the custodial parent.
“Baseball arbitration” refers to the process used in Major League Baseball in which if an eligible player's representative and the club ownership cannot reach a compensation agreement through negotiation, each party enters a final submission and during a formal hearing each side — player and management — presents its case and then the designated panel of arbitrators chooses one of the salary bids with no other result being allowed. This method has become increasingly popular even beyond the sport of baseball.
Insiders (and others) in the private equity business are accustomed to seeing a good deal of discussion ' academic and trade ' on the question of the appropriate methods of valuing private equity positions and securities which are otherwise illiquid. An interesting recent decision in the Southern District has been brought to our attention. The case is <i>In Re Allied Capital Corp.</i>, CCH Fed. SEC L. Rep. 92411 (US DC, S.D.N.Y., Apr. 25, 2003). Judge Lynch's decision is well written, the Judge reviewing a motion to dismiss by a business development company, Allied Capital, against a strike suit claiming that Allied's method of valuing its portfolio failed adequately to account for i) conditions at the companies themselves and ii) market conditions. The complaint appears to be, as is often the case, slap dash, content to point out that Allied revalued some of its positions, marking them down for a variety of reasons, and the stock price went down - all this, in the view of plaintiff's counsel, amounting to violations of Rule 10b-5.
The DOJ's Criminal Division issued three declinations since the issuance of the revised CEP a year ago. Review of these cases gives insight into DOJ's implementation of the new policy in practice.
There is no efficient market for the sale of bankruptcy assets. Inefficient markets yield a transactional drag, potentially dampening the ability of debtors and trustees to maximize value for creditors. This article identifies ways in which investors may more easily discover bankruptcy asset sales.
With trillions of dollars to keep watch over, the last thing we need is the distraction of costly litigation brought on by patent assertion entities (PAEs or "patent trolls"), companies that don't make any products but instead seek royalties by asserting their patents against those who do make products.
