Category Archives: Blog

Hurricane Sandy Leaves Commercial Disputes Behind

As part of the coastline of the State of New York, Seaport, East River, Lower Manhattan and the businesses operating in the area were dealt a hard hand in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy late last year. As is always the case following such devastation, the City is putting in concerted efforts to see that the coastline is rebuilt. In December 2012, the New York Times confirmed plans by the operators of the Seaport Mall; Dallas based Howard Hughes Corporation, to construct a modern three storey b

Is That Online Image You Just Grabbed OK to Use?

The issue of copyrighting images has stirred a heated debate on LinkedIn. The question that got the discussion started? "I have been asked to take head shots and other portrait type photos for a new cli

Clouds of Federal Tweets

Nextgov looked at a random sample of 100 tweets from 10 different government organizations to find out what "feds are talking about, 140 characters at a time" by performing word frequency analyses to generated clouds of the 40 most-used words in the following Twitter feeds:

• FBI Press Office: https://twitter.com/FBIPressOffice
• Air Force Public Affairs: https://twitter.com/AFPAA
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LegalZoom Sued for Unauthorized Practice of Law

LegalZoom claims to be one of the best legal document service providers on the web. However, LegalZoom is facing a class action lawsuit in Missouri on the grounds that it goes beyond placing information into a form and enters into the realm of drawing instruments or documents that affect or relate to secular rights. The plaintiffs filing the lawsuit include those who had used LegalZoom to incorporate and purchase a will. LegalZoom never seemed to be a legitimate operation. When you visit the

Cargill Restarts Arkansas Turkey Plant

Cargill, the 150-year old food and agricultural company, is about to hit the reset button on operations. Observers are wondering if the company will completely reboot. On August 3, Cargill sent out a recall for over 35 million pounds of ground turkey. The recall was one of the biggest American meat recalls in history. The problem triggering the recall started in February when a salmonella outbreak was

The Great Coca Cola Trial

Harvey Washington Wiley was a man with a mission. As Chief Chemist of the United States Department of Agriculture Division of Chemistry and one of the founders of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists, Wiley led a crusade against the use of chemical additives in food and drugs. Using a specially selected "poison squad" (the twelve volunteers that he used to test food safety), Wiley's campaign for purer food and drink products became the stuff of legend.  Although the Division of Ch

Johnson & Johnson Subsidiary Ortho-McNeil Pleads Guilty to Promoting Epilepsy Drug for Unapproved Uses; Settles Civil Suit for $75 Million

Ortho-McNeil, a unit of Johnson and Johnson, entered a guilty plea on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts to a misdemeanor for alleged illegal promoting of Topamax, a drug designed to treat epilepsy, for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, according to PR Newswire. The government alleged that Ortho-McNeil used a promotional program called the "Doctor for a Day Program" to promote Topamax for psychiatric uses, allegedly paying physicians, incl

Noncompetes in Texas: Can Money Alone Serve as Consideration for an Enforceable Noncompete

My good friend Mike Maslanka has an excellent post up on his Work Matters Blog this week discussing the Texas Supreme Court's granting review of  Marsh USA Inc, et al. v. Cook.  At issue is whether an employer can use cash or some other cash-like compensation (here it was stock options) as the sole consideration to support a noncompete agreement. The answer under current law is pretty clearly no it can't - this is what was held by the court of appeals that held in favor of the empl

Where Are the US News Top 30 Law Schools of 1996 Now?

If one is interested enough to get beyond the chatter about which law schools rose or fell a couple of places in the 2009 US News ranking, one might want to ask "where are the Top 10, or 20 (or even 30) law schools of 1996 now? Click on the image (left) to find out. You might note the position gains/losses for some Top 10 schools -- Penn, plus 4 from 11 to 7, Duke, minus 4