Mass Law Blog
Intellectual property and business litigation, Massachusetts and nationallyWritten by humans
Lee Gesmer’s Mass Law Blog began in 2005, and contains almost 600 posts. The site initially focused on Massachusetts law, but today it follows business and intellectual property law nation-wide. The site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm represents startup and established companies in the areas of litigation, transactions (including financings, mergers and acquisitions), IP rights, taxation, employment law, standards consortia, business counseling and open source development projects and foundations. You can find a summary of the firm’s services here. To learn how Gesmer Updegrove can help you, contact: Lee Gesmer
Mass. Appeals Court Reverses an Unusual Trial Order in Non-Compete Case: Trillium v. Cheung
Here is an unusual spin on Massachusetts non-compete law. As best I can understand the facts (which require a bit of "between the lines" reading) Trillium sued Cheung, a former employee of Trillium. Cheung had, it appears, released an employee from a non-compete agreement without company approval. Trillium's suit asserted breach of fiduciary duty to the company. A trial ensued, but at the outset the judge observed that if the underlying non-compete agreement had not been enforceable the...
Two Recent Noncompete Cases From the Superior Court
Noncompete opinions from the Massachusetts Superior Court are few and far between, so the two decisions that have been issued so far this year -- one from Judge Peter Lauriat sitting in the Suffolk Business Litigation Section (BLS), the other from Judge Thomas R. Murtagh in Middlesex Cournty -- are worth noting. Both judges are respected judicial veterans, and each decision illustrates a legal principle basic to this controversial and often confusing area of law. The more note-worthy of the...
Redigi Case Poses A Novel Copyright Question on the Resale of Digital Audio Files – Is “Digital First Sale” Legal?
You know all those used music stores you used to love to go to back in the day when you bought music on CDs? You could browse through used CDs and buy them for less than retail. Maybe you still do (kudos to Deja Vu Records in Natick, Mass.). Of course, you can do the same thing online. The founders of Massachsetts-based Redigi figured, why can't we create a marketplace that will allow people to do the same thing with their digital music files? Or, as Redigi puts it: " Sell your old...
7th Circuit Reminds District Court: Manifest Disregard of the Law Is Not Grounds for Vacating an Arbitration Award
One of the risks of electing to resolve a dispute in arbitration is that, apart from a few narrow exceptions, the decision of the arbitrator is non-appealable. This can be very hard on the losing party, who believes the arbitrator completely misapplied the law or, in the terminology of the courts, "manifestly disregarded" the law. Affymax believed it was faced with such a situation when an arbitration panel ruled in favor of Otho-McNeil-Janssen on certain issues in a complicated patent...
Cases Cited in My 2011 MCLE Noncompete Chapter Update
Earlier this year Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) asked me to update my 2009 chapter on Employee Noncompetition Agreements. The revised chapter, part of the 2-volume Massachusetts Employment Law series, was published in June. Below are links to the cases I added to this chapter. I've also included a sentence or two regarding each case. However, I did not make an effort to describe every legally significant aspects of each case. Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc. v. Pemberton, 27...
Jury Consultants post – Rajaratnam: Are They Worth It?
I was interested to read the The Wall Street Journal's report that Raj Rajaratnam spent $300,000 on jury consultants before the trial in which he was convicted on all 14 counts of securities law violations. As my teenage daughter might say, "fail"! OK, I admit that I'm being a bit unfair. From everything I read in the press regarding this trial it would have been astounding if Mr. Rajaratnam had been acquitted. After all, the government had something quite rare in insider trading cases:...
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Lee Gesmer