Posts on ‘July 7th, 2009’

It may look harmless, but it’s a legal land mine for employers. Management-side lawyers are warning employers about the hidden dangers of LinkedIn, the popular business networking site that posts recommendations for job candidates. Specifically, attorneys are advising employers to be wary of giving glowing remarks about employees on the site because the employers risk having the recommendations used against them in a discrimination or harassment suit.

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor got a vote of confidence on Tuesday, less than a week before she goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearing. The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, by a unanimous vote, has rated her “well-qualified” for the Court. It’s the highest rating the committee gives, and it’s the same rating the committee gave to the four most recent additions to the Supreme Court.

Terminated employees sometimes steal vital data to improve their job opportunities with a new employer. Employers have been increasingly using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’s civil remedies to sue such employees, but there has developed a body of district court opinions that refuse to apply the CFAA. Attorney Nick Akerman explains why these opinions are not likely to survive appellate review, and also provides a strategy to avoid the application of these decisions.

Any unfortunate comment by an attorney can be caught in new media devices and spell disaster for a pending case. Attorney Ernest Teitell and consultant Susan Heller prime attorneys for what to watch for and help them overcome instincts to provide all possible background and context to a case.

The Heller Ehrman estate is considering suing Covington & Burling and 14 partners who defected to the firm last September for breach of fiduciary duty, according to court filings and other sources. To many, the partners’ defection was the straw that broke Heller’s back. Many blamed the move for the collapse of merger talks with Mayer Brown. More to the point, the departures caused Heller to default on a bank covenant that restricted partner losses. The banks froze the firm’s accounts, and the firm called it quits Sept. 26.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. led a Supreme Court this term that often served up half-loaves for liberals and conservatives, businesses and consumers alike. The justices faced momentous shifts in Court doctrine on issues ranging from the Voting Rights Act to the constitutionality of workplace affirmative action, and then stepped back from the precipice. But are Roberts and his conservative allies just pacing themselves, slow-walking their juggernaut in hopes of effecting change quietly, without triggering a backlash?

Famed baseball manager Tony La Russa has quietly dropped his high-profile and much-maligned lawsuit against Twitter over a snarky impersonator on the microblogging Web site. La Russa’s lawyer wrote in a court filing that his client was dismissing the case, adding that “No payment was made by Twitter to La Russa in exchange for this dismissal.” Legal observers were skeptical of the merits of the case, which appeared to be the first legal challenge to the popular San Francisco startup.

Although the Obama administration appears to have backed off from more extreme plans to merge the Securities and Exchange Commission in a major consolidation of agencies, the SEC may still surrender authority to the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and a new consumer protection agency. Inept as some divisions of the SEC may have been, however, it does not follow that moving around the boxes on a regulatory design chart will improve matters, says law professor John C. Coffee Jr.