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
Spoilation = Destruction of Evidence = Dismissal + Sanctions
Here is a link to Judge Judith Fabricant's recent decision in Stein v. Clinical Data (reported on the front page of the November 30, 2009 Mass Lawyer's Weekly), where she found that the plaintiff had destroyed evidence. Judge Fabricant sanctioned the plaintiff in this case by dismissing his case and ordering him to pay almost a quarter of a million dollars in attorney's fees and costs to the defendant. These cases are relatively rare (since the party who destroys evidence rarely is caught),...
Westlaw, Lexis, Announce That They are Yielding to Google Scholar, Terminating Legal Search Service Effective Immediately
Just kidding, but Columbia Law School's Altlaw, which I've used off and on, really is shutting down: Nov. 19, 2009. Earlier this week, Google announced the addition of legal cases to Google Scholar. It's good, very good. But you don't have to take our word for it: try it out yourself. Everything we have done or planned to do with AltLaw, Google has does better. What else would you expect? Search is their core business; they have hundreds of brilliant engineers, a vast computing...
Judge Michel Announces Resignation, Lays it On the Line (and promises more to follow)
CAFC Chief Judge Paul Michel doesn't pull punches when he states his views on problems with the U.S. patent system and the federal courts more generally, and he didn't pull too many when he announced his upcoming retirement from the CAFC on on November 20, 2009. A few notable quotes from his speech: On interlocutory appeals of claim construction rulings to the CAFC: A provision in a Senate patent reform bill would allow interlocutory appeals of Markman rulings. Predictably, Judge Michel...
"STOP PUTTING CLAUSES INTO YOUR CONTRACTS THAT SAY YOU CAN AMEND THE CONTRACT AT ANY TIME IN YOUR SOLE DISCRETION BY POSTING THE REVISED TERMS TO THE WEBSITE" . . .
... says Professor Eric Goldman, in his apologetically belated comments on Harris v. Blockbuster Inc., (N.D. Tex. April 15, 2009). I discussed this case briefly in April, shortly after the decision was published. To reprise, the court held that an arbitration clause in Blockbuster's online t's and c's was unenforceable because Blockbuster was permitted to unilaterally amend the contract without notice. Prof. Goldman's take on it (in addition to the title of this post), is - This language has...
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