Where law firm leaders' "gut judgement" was once sufficient, running the business well now requires solid intelligence (yes, Big Law is a business). Decisions must balance the demands of clients with those of the partnership. Law firms are awash in data, but harnessing it to support sound decision-making is a major challenge.
Consumers' Digital Music Price-Fixing Suit Ruled No "Class" Act<br>Marshall Tucker Band's Former Manager Loses Bid for Attorney Fees After Prevailing in Trademark Action Brought Against It By the Band
Social media gained a new level of First Amendment respect on June 19 as the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a North Carolina law that barred registered sex offenders from posting on social networking sites.
The ransomware attack on June 27 on DLA Piper sounded an alarm for Big Law. The world's biggest firms are just as prone to ransomware attacks as any other company, and the potential ramifications of a network-crippling malware infection are wide-ranging for a service industry that holds the legal fate of corporations in its palm.
Following the May 2017 WannaCry ransomware infiltration into over 10,000 organizations and individuals in over 150 countries, it is clear that businesses across industries have no choice but to spend time and resources digesting and culling through the cybersecurity information barrage.
The Supreme Court let stand a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision that said issuers of takedown notices aren't liable under the DMCA unless they actually knew that the material did not infringe their copyright, or were willfully blind to that knowledge.
A New York trial court judge struck a defendant's answer in a media-based breach of fiduciary duty and unfair competition suit, after finding that 2,000 emails, including attorney-client privileged information possessed by the plaintiffs, had been hacked and stolen.
A Texas company has accused Snap Inc. of infringing four patents with systems that allow Snapchat users to scan "Snapcodes" and add friends on the popular social networking app.
At the Oscars in March, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand made “inclusion rider” go viral. But Kalpana Kotagal, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll had already worked for months to write the language for such provisions. Kotagal was developing legal language for contract provisions that Hollywood's elite could use to require studios and other partners to employ diverse workers on set.
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.
The legal implications of branding generally arise initially for companies during the process of selecting a company name and any initial product or service names. For drug development companies, however, careful consideration should also be paid to the implications of branding a clinical trial.
'Disconnect Between In-House and Outside Counsel is a continuation of the discussion of client expectations and the disconnect that often occurs. And although the outside attorneys should be pursuing how inside-counsel actually think, inside counsel should make an effort to impart this information without waiting to be asked.
