New England Biz Law Update

In the wake of a landmark Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling in 2005, an employee’s severance pay must be included under the state’s Wage Act, a state Superior Court judge has found.

Tagged with: March 2011 issue

Massachusetts Superior Court judge in the Business Litigation Session has found that a damaging e-mail a defendant inadvertently forwarded to opposing counsel was privileged and should therefore be stricken from the case.

Tagged with: Nov. 2010 issue

Lawyers and a federal judge say a recent ruling from the Southern District of New York shows that litigants who act in good faith but negligently fail to preserve electronic discovery can be subject to severe sanctions.

A dramatic jurisdictional split among the federal circuit courts of appeal has put in jeopardy more than 400 cases decided by the National Labor Relations Board over the past year-and-a-half.

Two recent cases dealing with the use of outside counsel for internal corporate investigations — including one involving the international law firm Proskauer Rose — underline the dangers of representing a company and one of its employees at the same time.

Securities lawyers are closely monitoring the outcome of a motion for reconsideration in a 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals fraud case that has many claiming the court has gone too far. In SEC v. Tambone, the court radically expanded the scope of liability in securities fraud investigations by holding that the conduct of two mutual fund executives could constitute an “implied fraudulent statement” even though they did not actually make any false or misleading statements.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently heard arguments in a case involving the tension between an individual’s right to a jury trial in an employment bias case, and the strong public policy favoring enforcement of arbitration agreements. In St. Fleur ...

The counterclaim of an employee sued by his former employer for violating a confidentiality agreement was recently dismissed under the Massachusetts anti-SLAPP statute – even where he claimed his former employer’s lawsuit violated an unfair-competition law. The employee, Wiliam Shields, ...