Corporate and Business  Law Journal

By: Jacklyn Brandby

In 2017, a former Uber employee published an essay describing the details of her work experience as a site reliability engineer. In this essay, the employee wrote about inappropriate behavior by her manager and stated that when it was reported to human resources, the company provided no relief.

By: Nick Kandas

This week (February 25, 2020) in Personalized Media Communications LLC v. Google LLC, Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Texas asked the parties to provide briefing on the impact of a federal circuit decision on this case. Personalized Media Communications responded by writing that machines, in this case servers, are agents of Google. Unpacking how Personalized Media arrived at this incredulous claim requires a quick and exciting dip into the world of patent venue.

By: Nicholas Beatty

On November 6, 2019, Plaintiff Gerald Lovoi, derivatively on behalf of Netflix, Inc. (“Netflix”), brought a stockholder derivative complaint against the company’s board of directors (the “Board”) and executive officers.

By: Adina Weisberg

BigLaw has been slow on improving diversity; top law firms will not even be close to mirroring law school classes until 2057 (for gender diversity) and 2084 (for racial diversity). To address this issue, five firms will work with Diversity Lab, through its Move the Needle Fund (“MTN”), on incorporating experimental methods based on research and data.

By: Dallin Hendricks

Regulation S-K provides detailed instructions for the registration statement and prospectus issuers use in an offering of securities. On November 9, 2020, three amendments to Regulation S-K will go into effect. The SEC explained that these amendments were intended to “modernize the description of business, legal proceedings, and risk factor disclosures that registrants are required to make pursuant to Regulation S-K.”

By: Alexa Weber

In The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has sued Match Group, Inc. (“Match”) for allegedly tricking individuals to subscribe to Match.com, an online dating service, through fraudulent advertising, deceptive business practices, and unfair denial of access to subscriber accounts. Match controls about one-quarter of the online dating market and owns approximately 45 separate online dating services, including Match.com, OKCupid, Tinder, and PlentyOfFish.

By: Trevor Cook

Prophecies about inevitable and imminent changes in the provision of legal services and the profession of law itself have proliferated in recent years in the wake of rapid advances of technology. Artificial intelligence and machine learning and their implementation in natural language processing (NLP) applications is one facet of these technologies that offers great promise but has been adopted with mixed results. For example, the major electronic legal research providers have already implemented NLP technology into their platforms to enhance search results and suggest further relevant resources to their users, but the technology’s promise has not been fully realized in the realm of “document automation.”

By: Matthew French

2020 began with a surging economic climate that appeared to foreshadow a heavily prosperous set of fiscal quarters that would likely present not only an opportunity for growth in the startup technology spectrum, but also one which would naturally give rise to countless mergers and acquisitions. However, as the world began to experience the true impact of the emerging Coronavirus pandemic, that optimistic outlook slowly transposed into a bleak twilight of economic uncertainty. The following months showcased the utter fragility of the inter-personal corporate marketplace, as social distancing restrictions forced capable entities to transition to remote-work platforms and catalyzed less fortunate corporations into bankruptcy. To the average entrepreneur, this landscape appeared to set the stage for a surge of innovative opportunities arising out of the startup and Big-Tech spectrums; after all, social distancing cultivated both an optimal setting for technological need and a captivated consumer marketplace. Yet the reality of the startup and Big-Tech spectrum was far more constricted.

By: Jacob Stock
The facts underlying In re: Grand Jury Proceeding read as well as any legal thriller: Felix Sater, a man wrapped up in fraud and racketeering for the mob, becomes an informant for the feds and helps to track down US law enforcement’s most wanted. Hot on his tail is Frederick Oberlander, a lawyer working hard for his clients to recover the funds lost in Sater’s former schemes. As Oberlander works the cases, however, he discovers information related to Sater’s cooperation with the government is sealed, and the Second Circuit enjoins Oberlander from publicly disclosing the information. Frustrated by the red tape, Oberlander releases the information anyway, resulting in several grand juries being impaneled to initiate a criminal investigation.