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
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:...
How to (or Not to) Write for the Supreme Court
"I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter." — George Bernard Shaw Non-lawyers see lawyers arguing before judges on television and in the movies, and they get the mistaken impression that oral argument is the heart and soul of lawyering. In fact, it's not. Most judges based their decision on a careful reading of the legal briefs submitted to them. That's particularly true of the Supreme Court, where each side to a case may spend hundreds or thousands of hours...
This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find a summary of our services here. To learn how GU can help you, contact:
Lee Gesmer