It looks like Robert Osher, the new general counsel and chief operating officer at Miramax, has good timing. The industry veteran returns to Miramax after seven years as president of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, and will pick up where he left off with new opportunities and direction. The company was founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, but Osher dodged that bullet because Miramax was sold to Walt Disney before his time....
Two rules make up the bedrock of pretty much any basic writing instruction: know the difference between your and you’re, and don’t use passive voice. Passive voice is one of the main literary bogeymen, despised by grade school English teachers and law school writing professors alike. But there are plenty of times when the passive tense is the perfect choice, particularly in legal writing. Here’s why. The passive voice, for those who have forgotten, is a specific grammatical construction where the noun that could be the acting object of the sentence appears as its subject....
If that’s good, this is even better: Practice Point was specifically designed to meet the needs of in-house attorneys. That’s right, someone is finally taking the time to give in-house counsel the TLC they deserve. Let’s take a look. Content, Expertise, and Technology Thomson Reuters’ Practice Point works by taking the best content from Westlaw and Practical Law, curated by experts and attorneys, and organized by areas, projects, and tasks. (Disclosure, if you missed it above: Thomson Reuters is FindLaw’s parent company....
Former Galleon hedge fund head Raj Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison by a federal judge today. He was also levied a $10 million fine. The sentencing culminates the legal battle against the former executive accused of insider trading. A jury convicted him of securities and fraud last May. Rajaratnam’s sentence is the longest ever for insider trading, The New York Times reports. It’s also a boon for federal prosecutors who have been trying to crack down on fraudulent activity on Wall Street....
Rite Aid has reached a $20.9 settlement over a FLSA wage and hour class-action lawsuit. The settlement effectively ends 14 of the 15 lawsuits the company faced for allegedly misclassifying its assistant managers as exempt employees, reports The Patriot-News. Plaintiffs argued that the assistant managers performed the work of non-exempt employees. So despite their titles, the managers should have been classified as non-exempt and entitled to benefits like overtime pay....
Attorney Robert Walmsley has been on the forefront of surrogacy law since before it became the law. That’s because he represented the biological parents against a surrogate they hired in Johnson v. Calvert, the groundbreaking case that upheld a surrogacy contract in California in 1993. And so it was natural for him to cite his own case on behalf of his client in a dispute between a surrogate and a biological father....
So you’ve decided to “hang your shingle” (oh, do I hate that phrase). Being a solo practitioner, by definition, is a solitary affair. That seems obvious from the word “solo,” but it’s solitary in a metaphysical sense, too. It’s obvious, but not as easy as it sounds. Where do you find other solos? Social media is a good place to start, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn. There will most likely be a group for solo practitioners in your area....
Internet users can breathe a collective sigh of relief as the Ninth Circuit has just reaffirmed their prior precedent that violating a website’s terms of service is not a criminal act. While the appeal handed down is a mixed bag of good and bad news for Rimini, the company Oracle sought to hold criminally liable for violating Oracle’s TOS, the good is that Rimini has escaped the criminal liability portion of the district court’s judgment....
There is not a single reputable business or government agency in existence that will ask for your Social Security number and other private identifying information over email. And if there is, the people running that agency are really, really stupid. Newsflash folks: That email that appears to have come from your local United States District Court? The one notifying you that you’ve been selected for jury duty and asking you to send a whole bunch of private information or face fines and jail time?...
It’s a heck of a business model: Start your own firm. Then hire unpaid interns and post-bar clerks, many of whom are so desperate for a few lines of experience on their resumes that they will gladly take anything. If they quit, hire another intern or two. If they stay, have them handle your research, writing, and other grunt work, preferably with their school-provided research accounts. And if an intern proves to be truly valuable, hire them at something approximating a living wage once they pass the bar, and provide them with their own set of interns....
If you advise businesses, or run your own brick and mortar practice, you know, the signage on the door, and even in the parking lot, matters. And not just legally, from the customer’s perspective, if your door says “push” but needs to be pulled, customers are likely to leave confused by why the door seems to be locked but the lights are on. You might not be so fortunate as to get the opportunity to charge a Tennessee hardware store owner your hourly rate to explain that his “no gays allowed” sign is a really, really, really bad business decision (even if state law doesn’t forbid sexual orientation discrimination)....
If you want to protect your data, privacy, and communications from corporations, government snoops, or hackers, end-to-end encryption is a great way to start. It’s the type of encryption Apple and Google added to their mobile devices and smartphones over a year ago, leading to government claims that such encryption will be used to protect terrorists and kidnappers. The Berkman Center brought together security, policy, and intelligence experts to examine the impact of Apple, Google, and other communication providers’ decision to make easy, end-to-end encryption the default in their phones and mobile devices....
Walmart v. Dukes is one of those landmark decisions that will confuse law students for decades to come, but it was more than an interesting legal citation. The Supreme Court’s holding decertified a class of 1.5 million current female employees of the retail giant, shortly after the Ninth Circuit had already removed a separate group, former employees, from the class. It’s this last group, led by named plaintiff Stephanie Odle, which will continue its fight in a district court in Dallas, after the Fifth Circuit revived her putative class action, approximately thirteen years after she first brought suit as part of the larger Dukes class....
Yes. Maybe. We don’t know! Microsoft shot itself in the foot. Windows 8 was a disaster meant for touch screens, and not coincidentally, since its release, the PC market has tanked. Yeah, mobile devices, tablets, yadda yadda, but look at operating system market share in terms of percentages: Windows 8 is lagging behind freaking Windows XP. That’s bad. Law firms need computers. And since they aren’t buying Windows 8 PCs, are they going Mac?...
FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Every single day, billions of people spend countless seconds, minutes, and hours on social media. Why? This occurs in part because it is the business of social media companies to do their best to hold you captive. They want their sites to be “sticky,” so that you spend your time (and ultimately your money) there....
The Law Library of Congress has debuted a new Congress website – Congress.gov – that will provide free public access to legislative information. The new site is slated to replace the THOMAS system, which was the official database for legislative information since 1995, reports iPhone J.D. Congress.gov is expected to be major step up from the previous system as it allows users to search across all content in the system at once....
The Trump administration has brought a new, hard-line approach to immigration enforcement, looking to ramp up detentions and deportations. Now, deportation fears are starting to impact some criminal proceedings, as undocumented immigrants take a more cautious approach to law enforcement. In Denver, Colorado, for example, several cases have been dropped after witnesses, concerned about their immigration status, skipped court. Four Domestic Violence Cases Dropped in Denver Kristin Bronson, Denver City Attorney, says that fear of immigration agents has led her office to drop four domestic violence cases since January, according to KUSA....
Kids know that SpongeBob SquarePants would protect The Krusty Krab’s secret recipe. Some seasoned judges don’t know that, however, even in a lawsuit over “The Krusty Krab.” Viacom, which created the cartoon crab shack on Nickelodeon, wants to keep a businessman from using the name for his planned restaurants. The big problem is, Viacom didn’t trademark the name. But another problem is, the judges don’t know SpongeBob. Don’t Know SpongeBob In Viacom International v....
The whole greenwashing epidemic has somewhat subsided as the consumer public has gotten a bit more savvy at spotting the bogus claims of a company being green. Even the government stepped in, years ago now, to help combat false and misleading claims of being green. For law firms, going green can often be prompted by more than just potential cost savings on paper, despite the high cost of the technology needed to go paperless without it feeling too different....
FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. You may be either “pro” or “con” when it comes to Facebook’s new Timeline feature. If you are in the “con” category, you may wish for a solution that will cause the service to revert back to how it was before it changed. But beware: In so doing, you could become the victim of a scam....
