Practitioner Contributions

By David Faigman, University of California Hastings College of the Law UC Hastings has launched an exciting new program, Lawyers for America, offering two-year fellowships for select law students with government and nonprofit legal services organizations. Participating students will gain valuable and sustained legal work experience, making them more competitive in a tight legal job market. At the [...]

Having implemented social media campaigns for many of the world’s leading professionals (lawyers, Fortune 500 executives, doctors, consulting firms, etc.) for more than six years, we know how overwhelming social media can seem. The effort to create ROI (return on influence) and ROR (return on relationships) can seem daunting—and not executing social media properly (i.e., not making meaningful business connections) certainly makes it a waste of time.

In a recent survey, ALM Legal Intelligence found that 62 percent of law firms had increased their use of alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) in the last year, and their top reason by far (91 percent of 194 firms) was to “attract and maintain clients.”

Although the Supreme Court’s recent health care and immigration cases dominated the news this year, few recent cases cast as long a legal shadow as the Court’s decision last year in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes.1 A major employment case in its own right, Dukes doubles as a landmark civil procedure case with relevance for class actions in every area of the law.

By Robert Pollock and Scott Popma, Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner One of the advantages Congress has afforded small businesses is a 50-75 percent reduction in Patent and Trademark Office fees for qualified “small” or “micro” entities. These savings can be very important for companies with tight operating budgets. Determining whether your business qualifies may [...]

There was a time long ago when going to law school, performing well, and passing the bar were near guarantees of a long career (including eventual partnership) in a law firm with reasonable pay and work hours. Those days are gone. In boom times, that expectation was replaced, for some, with the possibility of increasingly high wages and correspondingly long hours at Big Law.

Earlier this summer, the comment period closed on the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’s (“CFPB”) proposed rule establishing procedural requirements for designating when a nonbank financial firm would be subject to CFPB examination and supervision.1 The proposed rule highlights one of several provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act (“DFA”) authorizing the CFPB to examine and supervise nonbank “covered persons.”

A few years ago, a large financial services company called one of its outside lawyers, a partner at a large, well-regarded law firm, with a problem. The company was concerned about its prospects in a dispute over two valuable patents. In anticipation of litigation, the company wanted to cast doubt on the validity of the disputed patents, but it did not want to be associated publicly with the effort.

Written legal advocacy must be persuasive while competing with vast seas of other submissions engulfing the decision maker. To be clear, succinct and compelling all at once is no easy thing for lawyers at any level of experience. Although these observations are offered in the context of advocacy, they can apply to any professional writing, ranging from e-mail updates to supervising lawyers to memoranda for clients or judges.

By Dr. Silvia Hodges, TyMetrix I recently participated in a roundtable on purchasing legal services. When I brought up Procurement, a lawyer, let’s call her Marge, was quick to shut me down. She explained that as long as the legal department does a good job managing for value, the legal department will continue to select lawyers [...]

On Aug. 10, 2012, when President Obama signed into law the “Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012” (Pub. L. No. 112-158), the clock started ticking for U.S. companies with foreign subsidiaries that conduct any business with Iran.

The data broker industry is very much on the radar of regulators. In various forms, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has made it clear that entities that collect and aggregate consumer information on a large scale from various sources are one of its highest priorities.

Competition and the pace of change in the legal industry have never been greater, nor has the pressure on lawyers at all levels to develop new business. This is largely the result of various client pressures. Clients are much less loyal, much more cost/fee sensitive, increasingly un-bundling their legal work and using a plethora of alternatives other than hiring outside law firms/lawyers.

With the prevalence of email and text messaging in today’s business world, multi-billion dollar deals can be signed up without the parties ever sitting down together in the same room. Negotiations frequently occur over email, with lawyers and businesspeople alike sending quick emails, often in shorthand, with words that may not be chosen with the same degree of thought and care as the words that are “written” in the actual transaction document.

The Federal Trade Commission has published its long-awaited1 proposed consent order with Google Inc.2 to close its second investigation into Google’s practices (Google II). Under this order (Google II Consent Order), Google would agree to pay a record $22.5 million civil penalty to settle charges that it misrepresented to users of Apple’s Safari browser that it would not place tracking cookies on their browser, or serve targeted ads, and that these individuals did not need to take any action to be opted out of DoubleClick targeted advertisements.

Recent guidance from financial regulators in the United States and the data protection authorities in the European Union sound a note of caution about moving to the cloud without careful advance planning. The U.S. and EU authorities have focused directly on the responsibility of cloud customers to conduct diligence on cloud providers and to provide rigorous oversight of their service providers.

The recent health care fraud case United States v. Stryker Biotech et al.1 demonstrates the opportunities that exist for criminal defendants in cases where a company is indicted alongside its executives. At the same time, it provides leverage for company counsel during their pre-charge negotiations with the government.

There is a need for trial lawyers today like no other, and the future will require great trial lawyers even more than the present as fewer and fewer lawyers these days are given the opportunity to try cases.

In a recent article, we noted that Christopher v. SmithKline Beecham Corp., 2012 BL 150189, 80 U.S.L.W. 4463 (U.S. 2012), presented the U.S. Supreme Court with the opportunity to limit the significant deference afforded to agencies’ interpretations of their own ambiguous regulations, i.e., Seminole Rock or Auer deference.

Social media websites have skyrocketed in popularity. Every day millions of users across all demographic lines log on to Pinterest and various other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to get and share news and information about a limitless range of topics.