Posts on ‘July 22nd, 2009’

Courts address questions that, from a technical view, make no sense, e.g., “Where is the Internet?” The Web was designed with a distributed structure to answer that question with “Who cares?” But the law requires an answer, says attorney Stephen M. Kramarsky.

Patentees concerned with downstream use may want to take a closer look at a recent Federal Circuit ruling that an unconditional covenant not to sue authorizes the sale of a patented article, thereby exhausting patent rights in the article. Although the ruling represents a logical extension of existing patent exhaustion jurisprudence, it should be carefully considered when drafting patent licenses and covenants not to sue, say attorneys Max Grant, Jeremiah Wolsk, Kieran Dickinson and Zachary Kline.

The legal profession has been singled out as too socially exclusive by a U.K. government report on fair access to professions. The report calls on occupations such as lawyers and doctors to widen access to their professions after becoming increasingly exclusive in recent decades. The report found that of all professions in the U.K., lawyers typically grew up in the best-off families, with lawyers born in 1970 brought up in families with income 64 percent higher than the national average.

The luxury Manhattan apartment of disgraced attorney Marc Dreier was sold at auction Tuesday for $8.2 million, about $2 million less than the $10.43 million he paid in 2007. The sale came just one week after Dreier was sentenced to 20 years in prison for orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that fleeced more than $400 million from clients of Dreier LLP and investors to whom he sold bogus promissory notes. A source said the winning bidder is Ajit Jain, head of the reinsurance business of Berkshire Hathaway.

A former corporate partner in the New York office of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge hired in the months before the credit crisis hit is suing the firm after it fired him for failing to meet revenue expectations. Stephen R. Connoni acknowledges that he had not generated the $1.9 million in business projected in his agreement with the firm but argues Edwards Angell should have adjusted its expectations, given the economic meltdown. He claims he also was hampered by late-paying clients and a lack of firm support.

Receiving a subpoena or a federal grand jury “target letter” is likely to prompt a company to ask many questions, not the least of which is: “Does our insurance cover this?” The frequency with which policyholders will ask this question — and the stakes raised by the answer — are likely to increase as the economic climate brings a rise in governmental investigations, say attorneys Joseph D. Jean and Rachel M. Wrightson, who outline how to ensure coverage when procuring and renewing liability policies.