A Picture May Be Worth A Thousand New Clients
People say a picture is worth a thousand words, but Mountain View, CA-based Stratify Inc. is hoping that a picture may well be worth new clients, too. To that end, the e-discovery software firm launched its next-generation suite ' Stratify Legal Discovery 5.0 ' at the recent LegalTech 2005 show in New York.
Identifying Duplicates: Going Beyond Hash Values
Decisions on how to handle "duplicates" in electronic and paper document productions can have a profound impact on the time and cost required to process those productions. At the very least, firms should be making full use of readily available hash-value technology for identifying electronic duplicates and they should use linguistic pattern-searching to locate paper duplicates, or copies, of electronic records.
Searching For What Matters
The volume of e-data subject to discovery continues to grow ' seemingly exponentially. As courts, parties and litigators become more conscious of the importance of this data and more adept at ensuring its availability during litigation and regulatory matters, managing the data has become a more significant challenge for the producing and requesting parties. Clearly, the mandate is to discover better ways to find the "stuff that matters" in the most expeditious and cost-effective manner. <br>These days, that's more easily done than it has been in even the recent past. Achieving that goal requires modern litigators to assess how to best view, search, categorize and produce electronic data. Fortunately, evolving technology is allowing litigation teams to evaluate a variety of tools to help form the best strategy for digging through mounds of digital documents accurately and efficiently.
The Changed Landscape: Introduction
As franchise lawyers, we see hundreds of cases a year that impact our practice. Many are very important "bread and butter" cases, such as state court opinions dealing with parol evidence and integration clauses and federal cases involving trademark infringement. These are important cases that every franchise lawyer should know because they help in the day-to-day battles. Far more interesting to us, and we would imagine to most franchise attorneys, are the big cases that have happened maybe once or twice a year over the past 10 years that have made everyone wonder, "What in the world is going on?" We have selected 10 such cases that were decided in the past 10 years, made a substantial impact on franchise law, and have made most of the franchisor and franchisee legal community take a good, hard look at how to do business in the future. These are 10 cases that, at least at the time they were decided, changed the landscape for franchise attorneys and their clients.
Court Watch
Highlights of the latest franchising cases from around the country.
Franchise Litigation: 10 Cases That Changed the Landscape in the Past Decade
<i>Armstrong Business Services, Inc., et al., Appellants v. H & R Block, et al.,</i> Bus. Franchise Guide (CCH) '12,485, 96 S.W.3d 867 (Mo. App. 2002). The Armstrong case involved H&R Block franchisees who sued their franchisor for, among other things, encroaching upon the franchisees' territories through the franchisor's Internet business. H&R Block then filed a counterclaim, alleging that all of the franchisees' franchise agreements were terminable at will by Block.
News Briefs
Highlights of the latest franchising news from around the country.
Protecting Internet Communications
Law firms use Internet technology to communicate in ways that were not possible 10 years ago. <br>This boon in client-to-counsel and internal firm communications has allowed lawyers to share information as never before. But, more important, the technology associated with the Internet allows law firms direct control over Net communications because they own the individual networks that allow information to be shared, a situation that brings increased liability for copyright infringement, unless firms comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The good news for practitioners is that compliance requires little investment of time or money. Similarly, e-mail protection is readily available at little or no additional cost.
Markmatching: A Legal Primer On Using Trademarks For Contextual Advertising
Consider this tempting business scenario: Your e-commerce marketing manager has a new, and effective, method to drive traffic to the company Web site ' purchase your competitors' trademarks as keywords to match Internet users' searches to a "sponsor" listing for your company. The sweet spot of the proposal is that as a sponsor, your listing will appear before all other relevant search results. That will give your company an advantage over competitors. <br>So, do you tell your manager to purchase third-party trademarks as keywords? And how have the courts dealt with this situation in this country and abroad? Most important in advising e-commerce clients, though, is this consideration: How can you reduce risks associated with buying third-party trademarks as keywords?
