New England Biz Law Update

The new realities of corporate governance have created for in-house lawyers what amounts to a new professional standard.

Companies are going public again (or talking about it), and the initial public offering can again be discussed, without embarrassment, in polite company. A business contemplating an IPO needs to address the composition of its board of directors well in ...

A recent victory for a CFO who was fired after he raised complaints about his company’s accounting practices sends a strong message to in-house counsel on a number of different fronts, employment law experts tell New England In-House. The decision ...

Making a cross-border acquisition work is no small trick, particularly when most of the players involved are Chinese but the transaction is structured to look like a U.S.-style deal for capital markets. “You have two jurisdictions with two very different ...

Robert E. Healing, soon-to-be-retired corporate counsel of General Electric Company in Fairfield, Conn., recently stepped down as chairman of the board of the Pro Bono Partnership. In 1997, Healing founded the Partnership, a nonprofit organization that provides free legal services ...

In deciding whether to obtain patent protection outside the U.S., there are a number of factors a company should consider. As a preliminary matter, it is important to understand that most foreign-filed applications will eventually be published. As such, a ...

Over the past few years, the scope of responsibilities of the in-house general counsel has grown immensely. Much of the change is a result of the passage of the now well-known Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”). Understandably, general counsel have ...

In 2002, Tyco International restructured its upper management and decided to implement a "Six Sigma" quality improvement methodology throughout the company. William H. Mitchell Jr., an assistant general counsel at the company, volunteered to help implement the program by becoming a Six Sigma "black belt."

Companies and their counsel are often caught by surprise when they receive notification of an escheat audit. The 50 states and the District of Columbia are aggressively pursuing presumptively abandoned property. The variety of such property runs the gamut from ...

The SCO Group, already suing IBM for billions of dollars in a copyright infringement suit, has followed through on its threat to also sue users of the LINUX operating system for infringement of copyrights to the UNIX operating system.