E-discovery does not necessarily need to increase the cost of litigation. Many e-discovery tools make the process of collecting, reviewing and producing electronic documents efficient and economical. But e-discovery has become more than merely a discovery process; it has become an alternate method of trying a lawsuit. Although such effort often is misguided, often at [...]

Today’s New York Times has an article featuring Evan Chesler, presiding partner at Cravath, Swain & MooreLawyers, who chats … once again …. about getting rid of the billable hour.  The article also  discusses other pay arrangements (click here).  We covered these same comments by Chesler in an earlier posting this month (click here). But [...]

The long-anticipated petition appealing the landmark In re Bilski decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was filed at the Supreme Court Wednesday, setting the stage for a showdown over whether so-called “business methods” — processes and procedures, not widgets — are patentable. “This is the fundamental question of patent law,” [...]

Restructuring under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection process can sometimes take  years.  The large ones generate significant document reviews.  But as reported in the legal press and on various bankruptcy blogs (some examples here, here and here), some large Chapter 11 bankruptcies have turned into liquidations.  Virtually every large company that filed for Chapter 11 in the [...]

As reported by the Bloomberg and the HuffingtonPost websites last night, the FDIC may manage the so-called “bad bank” that the Obama administration is likely to set up as it tries to break the back of the credit crisis.   The FDIC has been beefing up staff (see our earlier post here).  FDIC Chairman Sheila Blair is pushing to run the [...]

We are getting a lot of questions on security clearances so we thought we’d put out a primer. There is an increase in the number of Federal government projects and positions coming into the DC Metro area as well as the Southeast, Southwest and Far West.  Many of these require security clearances.  Most of these [...]

As noted by Rees Morrison in his blog Law Department Management (click here),  the December 2008 issue of the ACC Digest (the magazine of the Association of Corporate Counsel) reports on the ACC Annual Meeting where Michelle Banks, the general counsel of The Gap, told an in-house counsel cost-management panel to “use contract attorneys”. We have read the [...]

Back in November 2008 we commented on the settlement negotiations around Carlson v. Xerox case (click here).   The noteworthy item for contract attorneys was the issue “can you pay a contract attorney $35/$40 an hour and bill them out at $500?”  The court was to have the final say.  The case has now been settled, approved by [...]

EU antitrust regulators raided Slovak Telekom last week on suspicions that the group had violated European anti-monopoly rules.  EU officials raided the company’s offices accompanied by national competition authorities as part of a probe into the company, 51-percent owned by Deutsche Telekom with the rest belonging to the Slovak state.  For story click here. At the [...]

A very small thing called “metadata” is getting bigger, at least in legal significance.   Litigation attorneys say that lawsuits demanding the production of metadata — the digital DNA of a document that can prove who created it, when and who may have altered it over time — have increased in recent years. And courts are honoring many of [...]