New England Biz Law Update

In-house lawyers working in Massachusetts but licensed elsewhere will have to register and pay a registration fee annually to the Board of Bar Overseers under a new ethics rule adopted by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court.

Characterizing a company’s e-discovery violations as “monumental,” a federal judge in California recently imposed $8.5 million in sanctions, yet again demonstrating that in-house counsel must actively assess efforts by their companies to produce requested electronic documents.

Business law practitioners in the Worcester, Mass. area are hoping for one major change to the state's business litigation session – the expansion of the court's jurisdiction to their city, the second largest in New England after Boston.

A number of pending cases in New England and before the U.S. Supreme Court could potentially have a significant impact on businesses in our region.

All in all, joint-defense agreements help level the playing field when addressing SEC investigations and securities enforcement proceedings and prosecutions. However, members of the groups that employ these agreements must be mindful of their limitations that could lead to the loss of protection of the attorney-client privilege or potential disqualification of counsel.

U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently told a Senate panel the Justice Department has replaced the controversial “McNulty memorandum” – which outlines federal prosecutors’ ability to encourage corporate defendants to waive the attorney-client privilege in order to cut a better ...

In overseas employee is protected under the Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower provisions, a U.S. District Court judge in New York recently decided in an apparent first impression ruling. In O’Mahony v. Accenture (No. 07-7916), Rosemary O’Mahony, a foreign citizen, sued the U.S. ...

A new breed of law firms providing “on-demand” in-house legal services is slashing corporate legal bills by as much as 50 percent in some cases. These outfits offer an alternative for companies who don’t want to hire or add a ...

The Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in a case raising the issue of when, if ever, employees can bring discrimination-based retaliation claims under 42 U.S.C. §1981. In CBOCS West v. Humphries, No. 06-1431, the Department of Justice urged the ...

In trio of decisions, court rules state tort claims, regulations trumped by federal law