Snarky reference to The Office helps earn reversal.
Company A wrote manuals to train employees. The works included "Positive Power & Influence", "Positive Negotiation Program", and "Promoting and Implementing Innovation". Big companies paid actual money to get the workbooks — and presumably to inflict them on their workers.
Several Company A veterans formed Company B. Company
Say you received part interest in a stock certificate representing 2.7 million shares. You got it in partial satisfaction of a contingent fee you earned in settlement of lawsuit. You value your stock interest at $12 million. But after taking the interest you learn that the issuing company cancelled the shares. You demand re-issuance; the transfer agent and the company
Three liquid crystal display manufacturers pleaded guilty last November to charges that they conspired to fix prices on LCD panels. Yesterday, the Antitrust Division announced that a fourth company, Hitachi Displays, Ltd., also "agreed to plead guilty and pay a $31 million fine for its role in a conspiracy to fix prices in the sale
The Second Circuit this week overturned a preliminary injunction that barred a maker of subway train braking equipment, Wabtec, from selling its product. The court agreed with the district court that Wabtec misused the trade secrets of the plaintiff, Faiveley Transport, and would likely continue. But the district court hadn't found that the Wabtec's improper use of the
President Barack Obama's nominee to chieftain the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, Christine Varney (post here), testified today before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Her opening statement went like this:
Mr. Chairman, Senator Specter, and members of the Judiciary Committee,
I am deeply honored to appear before you today. As someone who has spent
The Federal Trade Commission settled with Whole Foods over the organic grocer's acquisition of rival Wild Oats, according to the WSJ. The deal calls for Whole Foods to sell 32 Wild Oats shops, including19 it already shut.
The FTC's press release said:
The consent order will restore competition in 17 geographic markets that
Should you ever ask a federal judge to appoint an expert? Ought you to object if the judge comes up with the idea herself? If the other side does?
A Federal Circuit decision today didn't directly address those questions, but they lurked about anyway.
The case involved an invention involving "power inverter circuitry for laptop computers."
U.S. District Judge Christopher C. Conner today declined to dismiss federal antitrust claims against the world's largest makers of confectionery chocolate. His Honor did remove certain common law and consumer protection claims from the mix and deferred ruling on challenges to personal jurisdiction pending discovery into foreign defendants' contacts with the U.S. In re Chocolate Confectionary Antitrust Litig., No. 1:08-MDL-1935
Patently-O — which styles itself "[t]he nation's leading patent law blog" — today tucks in to "non-practicing entities or 'patent trolls'" and "the same small set of contingent fee plaintiff's lawyers asserting patent claims against the same small set of companies." Their principal crime? Suing Google for patent infringement.
Patently-O diagnoses the problem thus:
Unfortunately, the temptations and
A new issue of Barnett's Notes on Commercial Litigation went up this afternoon. Check it out here.
In this Issue
1. How Federal Courts Got Their Inefficiency. In which Your Editor blames procedural excess stemming from judicial risk-aversion.
2. Did You Know? A resurgent Antitrust Division opens an investigation into possible anticompetitive behavior