Posts on ‘December 1st, 2009’

The New Jersey Supreme Court is considering mass-tort treatment for claims by hundreds of former Prudential Insurance Co. workers that the company conspired with a New York law firm to bamboozle them out of employment benefits. Angela Roper, who represents 161 of the 236 plaintiffs, said in an application made public Monday that coordinated discovery and special masters would help resolve the seven-year-old matter.

In order to protect brands and trademarks, brand owners should plan to conduct regular assessments of available social networking and Web 2.0 sites, with an eye to determining their popularity with the brand’s target consumers and the ease of using these sites for infringement purposes.

Attorney Andrew Speaker, who made news when he took a trans-Atlantic flight while infected with a rare strain of tuberculosis, probably lost his bid to hold the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention liable for federal privacy act violations based on recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, which changed the standard for dismissal on the eve of his filing. According to a Georgia federal judge’s ruling, Speaker failed to meet that standard, which limits notice pleadings by requiring them to contain specific factual allegations.

U.S. Supreme Court justices seemed reluctant Monday to give the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. a “statute of limitations” way out of defending against a securities fraud class action involving Vioxx. The Court heard arguments in the latest round in a continuing battle over how easy or hard it should be to file class actions. Companies want speed, while shareholder and consumer groups insist they need time to develop the evidence for their claims.

Companies are successfully pushing their outside counsel to abandon the billable hour, a new survey indicates. The survey of 587 general counsel and chief legal officers found that 39 percent paid law firms more money this year under alternative fee arrangements than they did in 2008. “People are assuming the change is here to stay,” says Susan Hackett, general counsel for the Association of Corporate Counsel. “We’ve turned a corner, and I don’t think we’re going back.”

A Georgia jury has awarded $100,000 to an Atlanta woman who says a former friend defamed her in a best-selling novel by including personal characteristics that made her recognizable and then mixing them with other traits that were false and defamatory. The jury found that Haywood Smith, in “The Red Hat Club,” defamed her childhood friend Vickie Stewart. However, the jury found in favor of Smith and her publisher on the allegation of invasion of privacy and declined to award attorney fees to Stewart.