Regulation

Law firms seeking restrictions on cold calling from the recruiters with which they work would be prudent to use restraint and limit the scope of such agreements to terms they feel confident can be justified.

We continue this month with our discussion of the expanded reach of the Medicare reporting requirements under the Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP Extension Act of 2007 (MMSEA), which as of January 2011 is applicable to liability insurers and self-insured entities.

Wilmington, DE-based Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutz has ventured into the world of pop culture through its Los Angeles office. Records on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show that partner Grant T. Langton is helping Charlie Sheen, the former star of the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, with a trademark endeavor. Sheen is trying to trademark 22 catchphrases, as well as his name and signature.

All General Counsel should reach for their calendars now and circle July 1. That's the date when the new UK Bribery Act will take effect. The Act has extra-territorial reach and will impact almost every corporation doing business internationally.

What's at issue is control, obviously, and the great lengths to which some will go to maintain, it even as they benefit from the wide-open, free-flowing viral information torrent of the Internet. These copyright acquisitions are not primarily motivated by the desire to exploit the works and make money, but rather by the desire to stop the public circulation of texts and images the new owners do not like.

The use of new technology makes peoples' efforts to keep Internet behavior private more difficult, has given rise to renewed claims from consumers of unlawful intrusiveness by Internet data-collectors, and has revived the argument that such behavior unlawfully violates privacy expectations.

When the White House's intellectual-property enforcement coordinator, Victoria Espinel, submitted a wish list to Congress in March recommending 20 changes to federal intellectual property law largely aimed at ramping up criminal punishment for IP infringement, IP lawyers said the white paper recommendations would likely have only a tenuous effect, if any, on civil IP litigation or patent prosecution.

This edition of the Quarterly State Compliance Review looks at some enacted and pending legislation of interest to corporate lawyers. It also discusses some recent cases of interest, including decisions from Delaware and New York concerning the awarding of attorneys' fees.