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US v. Tucker, No. 08-6964, concerned a federal inmate’s 28 U.S.C. section 2255 motion claiming that his counsel provided ineffective assistance in failing to object to the use of his misdemeanor assault and battery conviction as a predicate offense for purposes of sentencing him as an armed career criminal and for failing to appeal his sentence on this ground. In vacating the district court’s denial of the motion, the court held that defendant’s counsel’s failure to object to the use of the misdemeanor conviction as a predicate violent felony conviction was objectively unreasonable and this failure prejudiced defendant....

Eric Sinrod is a partner in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris LLP (http://www.duanemorris.com) where he focuses on litigation matters of various types, including information technology and intellectual property disputes. His Web site is http://www.sinrodlaw.com and he can be reached at ejsinrod@duanemorris.com. To receive a weekly email link to Mr. Sinrod’s columns, please send an email to him with Subscribe in the Subject line. This column is prepared and published for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice....

If you didn’t know it already, this is not your father’s retirement. A generation ago “retirement” meant trading the nine-to-five for bingo numbers. Today, nobody plays bingo anymore. At least not lawyers. As we hit the “retirement” age, we re-purpose our lives. Here are the real-life numbers: 50-60 Somethings Remember when 55 was the retirement age? Ha ha ha ha ha. Now it’s a speed limit. It’s a measurement of how fast retirement options are catching up to us....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Tiger Woods has disappeared from the golfing scene while there has been a media feeding frenzy. Numerous women have come out of the woodwork claiming sexual relationships with the megastar. And while Tiger has sought respect for his privacy in this delicate time for his family, his attorneys have taken a more aggressive approach in court to protect their client....

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cucinelli isn’t giving up on his Affordable Care Act challenge quite yet. After the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found that 26 state plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the Act, Cucinelli, better known to healthcare reform watchers as the driving force behind one of the two individual mandate lawsuits the Fourth Circuit rejected in September, asked the Supreme Court to examine the standing ruling. Cucinelli claims that the plaintiff-states outside of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal’s jurisdiction could refuse to implement the health care plan, but circuit states Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Maryland could not; an anomaly that Cucinelli says the High Court should address, reports Politico....

The popularity of Netflix, globally, is unrivaled. When it comes to subscription-based streaming services, Netflix has achieved Pinky and the Brain levels of global domination (though notably you need Hulu to watch that epic cartoon). But Netflix didn’t deploy trickeration nor hairbrained plots developed in a laboratory by mice bent on world domination. Rather, it was just solid international business tactics that led the company into 190 different countries in only 8 years....

Portland’s naked bike ride recently roared through town last week, with thousands of au naturel participants. So, what was this festive occasion best suited for? Inebriated naked bicycling? Or, law firm marketing? Surprisingly, maybe the latter. At least if you’re a law firm looking to gain some publicity. When asked why the firm decided to sponsor the blush-inducing event, partner Mark Ginsberg responded by saying that many of the firms’ clients come from personal injury cases, according to the ABA Journal....

D&J Tire Inc. v. Hercules Tire & Rubber Co., No. 09-30275, was an action by a minority shareholder for breach of fiduciary duty arising out of defendant-executive’s failure to disclose that defendant corporation was in talks to be acquired when the executive served as a mandatary on plaintiff’s behalf to redeem his shares. The district court granted summary judgment for defendant. The court of appeals vacated the judgment, holding that: 1) because Louisiana’s prescription statute did not bar plaintiff’s rescission claim, the district court needed to determine whether plaintiff could prove that defendant’s directors failed to disclose a material fact; 2) because defendant’s directors were acting in their official capacity when redeeming plaintiff’s stock, Connecticut courts would impose a fiduciary duty to disclose material facts in this situation; and 3) there was no reason, under Louisiana law to apply another prescriptive period merely because defendant was also CFO of the corporation when the claim was based on his duties as mandatary....

In a $50 million sex discrimination lawsuit by a BigLaw partner against her firm, the judge is allowing the plaintiff to proceed as “Jane Doe.” U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson granted the partner’s motion to litigate anonymously, although the defendant law firm already knows her name. Even the press has outed her as the mostly likely one of two women partners at the Washington D.C. office of Proskauer Rose....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Concerns about foreign hackers have been heightened since the 2016 presidential election, given that various U.S. intelligence agencies reported foreign Internet efforts to influence that election. And with mid-term Congressional elections coming up, those concerns have not abated. Meanwhile, the personal Gmail accounts of some U.S. Senators and Senate staff recently were targeted, as confirmed by a Google spokesperson to CNN....

Liane Hornsey, head of human resources at Uber, abruptly quit following an investigation about how she handled racial discrimination claims there. According to reports, Hornsey dismissed internal complaints of racial discrimination and retaliated against whistleblowers at the company. Reuters, which broke the story, said it “raises questions about Uber’s ability to reform its culture and change some of its toxic behaviours.” Although Uber cleaned house after widespread sexual harassment claims last year, it’s hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel for the ride-sharing company....

In a prosecution for robbery of a federal bank through the use of a dangerous weapon, district court’s imposition of a sentence designating defendant as a career offender under U.S.S.G. section 4B1.1(a) is affirmed as escape from secure custody is a crime of violence within the purview of the career offender guideline. Read US v. Willings, No. 09-1334 Appellate Information Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Maine...

For small tech companies and startups, patent trolls are a serious problem. The cost of defending one case can often dwarf the costs of settling several cases. The IPR process is good, but it’s still not that cheap, and not always certain to work. Also, when the patent trolls descend, it’s not just one case. Often one patent troll will sue several companies using the same patent, and another common occurrence is seeing several trolls suing the same company over several different patents....

It’s been a busy weekend for lawyers fighting over President Trump’s immigration ban. On Friday, a federal judge in Seattle issued a nationwide temporary restraining order pausing the enforcement of ban. While the President took to Twitter to decry the outcome (and the judge), Department of Justice lawyers moved quickly for an emergency stay in the Ninth. Then, on Sunday morning, the Ninth rejected the government’s request, allowing the TRO to stand for the time being....

For many women, a difficult choice must be made whether to carry on with their careers at the expense of family, or to leave and raise a family at the expense of their careers. The truth is that the market has not regarded women kindly after they left to raise children. But because of the efforts of one woman attorney, it appears that there’s more hope for women attorneys wishing to get back into the game....

For in house and general counsel, mergers and acquisitions can be really big deals, and not just in the literal sense that the process requires stacks of paper and money that could fill a large room. During 2018, there were some really big mergers and a few really big merger fails. Below you can check out three of the biggest fails and wins. 1. The Sinclair-Tribune Merger When the media giant tried to swallow the less large media giant, the government said no....

Cease-and-desists letters, demands for personal injury payments, claims of defamation, slander and libel – these are the bread and butter of the demand letter. And boy are they demanding, always full of requests that must be met “immediately” and clients who will defend their rights “vigorously.” How you respond to a demand letter can help shape the tone and path of your following interactions, so make sure you do it well....

President Obama’s immigration reform plans won’t be coming to fruition anytime soon, thanks to a recent ruling by the Fifth Circuit. The court recently upheld an injunction against the immigration changes, finding that the Obama Administration was unlikely to win on the merits. Twenty-six states, led by Texas, had sued over the planned immigration overhaul, which would have provided work visas and halted deportations for millions of immigrants. Despite the central role of the immigration debate in the lawsuit, however, the Fifth’s ruling primarily dealt with standing and administrative law....

We’ve seen the figures tossed around in patent litigation. Even in frivolous suits brought by patent trolls, the cost of defending against infringement claims can be in the millions of dollars. And much like civil litigation, the high costs have necessitated a form of alternative dispute resolution: the inter partes review. Instead of filing a lawsuit, instead of engaging in extensive discovery, a third-party can request that the patent office reexamine the patentability of one or more claims in a patent....

In December, the National Labor Relations Board issued a controversial new set of regulations governing union elections. Well, they’re controversial if you’re a business that doesn’t want unions and takes advantage of a longer election timeline in order to disseminate anti-union propaganda. Tired of being pushed around by the clearly immensely powerful labor unions, business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have filed a lawsuit to stop the new regulations from going into effect....