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Washington, D.C.’s first micro-distillery — or, at least, its first legal one — has filed a lawsuit seeking to protect its trademark against legal action brought by a New York gin producer. New Columbia Distillers, the D.C.-based producers of Green Hat Gin, was sued for trademark infringement in November by Green Farms II LLC, which [...]

President Obama’s plan to use his executive authority to prevent gun violence comes on the heels of proposed legislation intended to give more power to gunshot victims after the fact. The new legislation by Representative Adam Schiff, D-Calif., would undo provisions of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005, which limits the [...]

In response to budget cuts and courthouse closures, the California Judicial Council today will consider allowing trial courts to hold traffic infraction proceedings by remote-location video. Critics call the proposal potentially unconstitutional and possibly unworkable, citing concerns about technology quality and whether defendants will be able to talk confidentially with their lawyers and interpreters. Go [...]

I’m predicting it right here and now: “In re: Subway 11-Inch Litigation” In a world where lawyers file class actions against basketball teams for resting their star players for the night that “class members” attend a game, how can there not be a class action on behalf of every Subway Footlong sub sandwich purchaser who [...]

At the end of November, as his team prepared to play its fourth game in five days against the Miami Heat in Miami, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich decided to rest four of his team’s best players — Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Danny Green. In fact, Popovich put the four players [...]

A one-time Fried Frank worker who was hit Tuesday with charges of stealing more than $376,000 worth of copy machine toner over a two-year period is one of two former Am Law 100 employees indicted on felony counts within the last week. On Friday, Mayer Brown’s former chief information officer was formally charged with 10 [...]

A federal judge has ruled that Getty Images, Agence France Presse and The Washington Post infringed photojournalist Daniel Morel’s copyrights by disseminating photos he took of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti without his permission. Significantly, the judge rejected the news organizations’ affirmative defense that Morel granted them a license to use the photos by posting [...]

The Senate Judiciary Committee will dedicate most of its time this spring to comprehensive immigration reform, including changes for technology companies and agricultural businesses, Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said today. Leahy also said the committee will continue oversight of protecting civil liberties, including the use of drones abroad as well as in the United States. [...]

Here are today’s three burning legal questions, along with the answers provided by the blogosphere. 1. Question: I live in the U.K. Can I be arrested if I tell a police officer his horse is gay? Answer: Not as of this week! (The Telegraph, ‘Insulting’ words crime which made it illegal to call a police [...]

As discussed here, jurisdictons such as Texas have become fed up with “chicanery” by lawyers who circumvent page limit rules by decreasing font sizes and white space in their briefs. In response, the Texas Supreme Court, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the state’s 14 intermediate appellate courts eliminated page limits in favor of [...]

Two investors have filed a class action suit against a Philadelphia-based law firm, alleging that the firm should have known its client, Mantria Corp., for whom it served as securities counsel, was engaged in a $54 million Ponzi scheme. According to the suit, the firm either knew or negligently failed to realize that Mantria was [...]

A new advisory from Citi Private Bank’s Law Firm Group and Hildebrandt Consulting lays out a changing law firm landscape — one that sees partners billing fewer hours, associates occupying a shrinking number of positions, and leaders acting more like businesspeople than lawyers. The bottom line, according to the report, is that the prosperity between [...]

Anyone wondering about the effect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Wal-Mart v. Dukes ruling needn’t look any further than the top 10 employment discrimination class action settlements of 2012. According to Seyfarth Shaw’s “Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report,” the $49 million settlements total was the lowest since 2006 and was far shy of the [...]

The new year finds a new name atop annual year-end lists of M&A legal advisers, with Skadden topping three separate rankings of law firms based on the total value of their corporate clients’ M&A transactions in 2012. The Skadden sweep, which the firm completed Friday when MergerMarket released its 2012 results, comes a year after [...]

The third year of law school has long been a punching bag for critics who argue it’s a waste of time and drives up the costs of a law degree, but there have been few serious attempts to do anything about it. Until now. Legal educators and top New York state court officials will gather [...]

Here are today’s three burning legal questions, along with the answers provided by the blogosphere. 1. Question: I am a supervisor in a government agency. One of my employees suffers from REALLY bad flatulence. Can I issue him an official reprimand for creating an “intolerable” and “hostile” environment for coworkers, and for “conduct unbecoming a [...]

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court wasted no time in ruling on a suspended colleague’s bid to have the court throw out criminal charges against her. On the same day the Allegheny County district attorney’s office filed a motion opposing suspended Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin’s petition to get the political corruption charges against her dismissed, [...]

Taking action in an appeal on behalf of institutional investors in Countrywide Financial, the Ninth Circuit has certified a question to the Supreme Court of Delaware addressing standing requirements for derivative shareholder actions. The circuit is seeking clarification on whether a derivative suit may survive following a merger that plaintiffs claim was “necessitated by, and [...]

A state law tort claim of failure to warn about risky medical devices is not pre-empted by the federal medical device law — so long as the state law duty of care runs “parallel” to a duty established by the federal law. That brain-twisting holding Thursday by an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit [...]

The Supreme Court on Wednesday supported efforts by Nike Inc. to rid itself of a rival’s trademark suit by promising not to pursue its own lawsuit against the competitor, Already LLC. The promise or covenant, the court agreed, rendered the litigation moot. The ruling is a continuation of the court’s efforts to rein in business [...]

A DOJ lawyer today defended the government’s refusal to publicly disclose post-mortem images of Osama bin Laden, telling the D.C. Circuit that it could expose Americans to retaliatory attacks. The case is one of several high-profile public record disputes pending in the court, including one over whether it will force the government to release information [...]

An attorney representing convicted child serial molester Jerry Sandusky told a judge today that his client’s trial was “structurally” unsound because trial counsel didn’t have enough time to prepare. The attorney also argued the court should have given the jury an instruction about how to assess the time gap between when Sandusky assaulted his victims [...]

Back in my day, after you passed the bar and became a fledgling lawyer, you typically went to work at a law firm. You would get dressed up in a suit, commute to work, pretend like you knew how to perform basic lawyer tasks (until such time as you actually did know how to perform [...]

Dykema Gossett has announced that is has expanded in the Midwest by launching an office in Minneapolis, the Detroit-based firm’s 12th location. Dykema’s first foray into the Minnesota market opens with two new partners: corporate attorney Joseph Roach, joining from local firm Briggs and Moran, and Reed Heimbecher from St. Jude Medical’s in-house legal department. [...]

The D.C. Circuit expressed some skepticism about the viability of a challenge to the government’s demand for information from gun dealers in four states about the multiple sale of certain semiautomatic rifles. The panel didn’t seem entirely convinced that the ATF demand letters require gun dealers to provide any information that isn’t outside of what [...]

When a former Dewey & LeBoeuf partner alleged that Citi Private Bank defrauded him by hiding the now-defunct firm’s true financial state when Citi loaned him money to cover his capital contribution obligations, it turns out he wasn’t the first person to publicly lob such accusations at Citi. In the months following Howrey’s 2011 demise, [...]

At the Lawyerist blog, Sybil Dunlop ponders an issue that, coincidentally, I was also thinking about earlier this week: Does the order in which you list recipients’ email addresses in the “To” line of an email matter at all? I was thinking about this vital question recently as I created a new email by hitting [...]

Via Simple Justice I came upon a great post from Eric Mayer on his Unwashed Advocate blog. Mayer proposes a 22-class law school course that will teach students about the practice of law — “not just the practice of law, but the most vexing, infuriating, bad-time-consuming part of practicing law. That is potential client evaluation [...]