New England Biz Law Update

Ruling suggests state law can control arbitral enforcement in federal court

[Editor’s note: This is the second segment of a six-part series – Succeeding In-House – by Christopher Mirabile, general counsel and CFO at IONA Technologies in Waltham, Mass., in which he will explain why basic legal skills are not enough ...

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently ruled that mitigation of damages is irrelevant to assessing an enforceable liquidated damages provision. The court in its first impression decision said it was illogical to consider mitigation because by agreeing in advance to ...

Patent owners

Recently, U.S. and foreign governments have been aggressively pursuing bribery investigations and enforcing relevant laws and regulations. In November 2007, Siemens disclosed that an internal investigation uncovered about $1.9 billion in questionable payments made by the company to outsiders between ...

It is the reverie of many a private firm lawyer: taking an in-house position to avoid ever again having to deal with a conflict of interest. An in-house lawyer has a single client, the company employing him, or so the ...

The subject of trade secrets arises often in business, especially when employees move from one company to another – sometimes to a competing company. Depending on the position formerly held, an employee may be privy to information considered proprietary and ...

As companies’ internal alternative dispute resolution programs continue to grow, in-house counsel and human resources managers should consider adding mediation to their ADR options. As an alternative to arbitration at the pre-litigation phase, mediation offers many of the same advantages ...

If your company wants to initiate a suit for a declaratory judgment that a planned product will not infringe a patent of another, then it is necessary to demonstrate that your business has taken “meaningful preparations” to conduct potentially infringing ...

A decade ago, only a handful of bankruptcy courts around the country had mediation programs. But that’s changing. Long associated with family law disputes and litigation generally, mediation programs were slow to catch on in complex business cases, including those ...