“Dallas’ 5th Court of Appeals has vacated and remanded a $22 million arbitration award after finding the arbitrator failed to disclose that a lawyer representing a party in the dispute had given him a ticket to an NBA basketball game, a wine basket and paid for expensive meals, among other things,” reports Tex Parte blog.
A jury in the Eastern District of Texas ruled in "ColorQuick LLC v. Vistaprint Ltd.that Vistaprint did not infringe a ColorQuick patent," reports The National Law Journal. Beforehand, the judge ruled there was no literal infringement, but he allowed ColorQuick's case to continue under the doctrine of equivalents. "The rarely allowed doctrine allows a patent owner to claim patent infringement when the infringing item doesn't literally fall within the scope of the patent claim but is equivalent to the invention," the story says. Most patent cases focus on literal infringement. Vista print lawyer Thomas Friel of Cooley Godward told the newspaper, "The one lesson I learned is to pay a lot more attention to doctrine of equivalents in expert reports." ColorQuick representatives declined comment.
“Wall Street financial institutions are pretty stingy about offers (less than half — 49 percent — plan to extend offers to 10 percent or less of their summer hires). But what everyone — including lawyers — should pay attention to is where they expect to hire: operations, debt/fixed income, corporate finance, research, and compliance,” reports The Careerist, a Texas Lawyer affiliate. “The message to lawyers is that there's ‘a tremendous shortage of compliance people,’ ” the story quotes Constance Melrose, the managing director of eFinancialCareers North America, as saying.
Law360 reports, “Democratic senators on Wednesday criticized a trio of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings, saying they privileged corporations and would bar individuals from accessing the justice system. ‘You get the unfortunate feeling that many of the justices view plaintiffs as a mere nuisance to corporations,’ Sen. Patrick Leahy, D.-Vt., said at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.” But the story says the winning attorney in one of those cases, Mayer Brown partner Andrew J. Pincus “defended the high court's decisions. Pincus, who pulled in the win for AT&T, said the Supreme Court was simply applying long-held legal principles to curb unusual applications of the law, and it would be impossible to predict the reach of the decisions.”
In New York, “Nearly 1,000 elected state judges will no longer receive assignments to cases where lawyers, their firms or their clients have contributed $2,500 or more to the judge's campaigns in the previous two years, or have collectively contributed $3,500 or more, under a new rule adopted by the court system,” reports The National Law Journal, a Texas Lawyer affiliate.
-- Angela Morris
Comments