New England Biz Law Update

Anyone who keeps tabs on the Massachusetts Superior Court’s Business Litigation Session in Boston has likely noticed an influx of lawsuits over the past year accusing businesses of improperly collecting ZIP codes from customers paying with credit cards. If that ...

Law firms that don’t ensure diversity within their ranks will lose out on opportunities to be hired by large organizations and young general counsels. That was one of the major takeaways at the annual meeting of Meritas — a referral ...

With 78 deals totaling $11.3 billion, merger and acquisition activity in New England bounced back strongly in the first quarter of this year. According to Mergermarket, the region hasn’t seen a quarter with that level of activity since the second ...

White-collar lawyers say gone are the days when a civil suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission is stayed simply because the U.S. attorney is prosecuting a parallel criminal case. The latest example illustrating the new reality: Securities and ...

The Appeals Court in Massachusetts has ruled in an issue of first impression that a Chapter 93A counsel-fee award can, as a matter of law, include the work performed by an in-house attorney who was first chair at a 17-day ...

While everyone has been fixated on patent trolls, experts say a different breed of abusive intellectual-property litigants have been making a comeback: businesses that assert dubious patents for strategic reasons. Patent trolls are non-practicing entities — those that hold a ...

A company that hired an independent contractor without requiring him to sign a confidentiality agreement could not later sue him for misappropriation of trade secrets, a Massachusetts Superior Court judge has decided. The plaintiff company apparently had brought aboard the ...

An arbitration clause in a collective bargaining agreement did not preclude an employee from going to court to sue her employer under the Rhode Island Civil Rights Act and the state’s Fair Employment Practices Act, the R.I. Supreme Court has ...

An insurance company did not have to cover the cost of a racketeering lawsuit involving the construction of shopping centers containing Walmart stores, in part because the policyholder failed to notify the insurer about the complaint “as soon as practicable,” ...

The national handwringing over the proliferation of so-called “patent trolls” is embodied in Boston, where two of the city’s most prominent and important economic drivers find themselves at odds over federal legislation designed to curtail abusive and frivolous intellectual property ...