Intellectual Property

Non-Sequiturs: 10.22.12

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Qualified Arby’s employees are literally willing to die for the company.

* Additional thoughts, from Professor Josh Blackman, on Judge Richard Posner’s awesome streak of book reviews. [Josh Blackman]

* Meanwhile, Professor Kyle Graham wonders: How would Judge Posner review Moby Dick, Fifty Shades of Grey, and other classic literature? Incredibly, that’s how. [noncuratlex]

* Apple responded to Samsung’s blame-the-jury appeal with knives out and guns blazing. [Ars Technica]

* This attempt at using a disguise to commit ID theft was so pathetic, I almost feel bad for the guy. And yes, there is a photo. [Lowering the Bar]

* A longtime Arby’s employee fled when a knife-wielding robber broke into the restaurant in the middle the night. And then Arby’s fired her. At least unemployment > dying alone in an Arby’s. [Consumerist]

* Models, runway shows, and confidentiality agreements, oh my! [Fashionista]

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British Court Says Apple Is Way Cooler Than Samsung;
But Coolness ≠ IP Infringement

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Well, clearly, the biggest technology news today is that Mark Zuckerberg bought a home in the second hippest neighborhood in the country. This means we’re neighbors, and it means I’ll probably have to move soon because my rent will probably double by dinnertime.

Other than that, the global Apple v. Samsung battle royal continues. This week, a British appellate court ruled on the European incarnation of the case. So what’s the score between these tech titans?

Thus far, Apple has done alright in the U.S., but not so much in Japan. And now, let’s just say our European brethren may like Apple products as much as the rest of us, but they don’t worship at the altar of holy rounded corners as devoutly as Americans….

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Morning Docket: 10.18.12

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Steven Nataupsky’s résumé?

* Conflict of interest? What conflict of interest? We didn’t have a conflict of interest! Covington & Burling is appealing its disqualification from representing Minnesota in a suit against former client 3M. [Capital Business / Washington Post]

* “If I sent my résumé through the firm, I wouldn’t get looked at.” Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear is hiring so many awesome associates that the firm’s managing partner doesn’t even know if he’d stand a chance. [National Law Journal]

* Doug Arntsen, the ex-Crowell associate who stole $10.7M in client funds and spent it at strip clubs, was sentenced to four-to-12 years in prison. [New York Law Journal]

* Music to Benula Bensam’s ears? In a case of dueling sentencing memos, prosecutors want Rajat Gupta to spend 10 years in prison, but his own lawyers want him to be sent to Rwanda. [DealBook / New York Times]

* Donald Polden, the dean of Santa Clara Law, will be stepping down at the end of this academic year. Hope they’ll be able to find a new dean, because every “influential” school needs one. [San Jose Mercury News]

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Non-Sequiturs: 10.16.12

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* Now they’re telling people NOT to go the highest-ranked law school possible? Does not compute… [The Careerist]

* If Thelma and Louise had made it to their 70′s, they might look like this. By that I mean, running men over with their car for insurance money. [FindLaw]

* “Hello, 911? Someone stole all my marijuana plants. Mm-hmm, yes, yes I do. You’ll send an officer over to help? Great, thank you!” [The Consumerist]

* Buying a judge a bottle of wine and offering to settle your dispute privately doesn’t mean what this lawyer thought it meant. What does it actually mean? Sanctions. [South Florida Lawyer]

* The overall SCOTUS docket is decreasing in size, but the number of IP cases is going up. I am smartphone, hear me roar. [SCOTUSblog]

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Biglaw’s Most Underrated Firms by Practice Area

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‘Standing with your arms folded is underrated.’

Hot air balloons, Ice Cube, new socks, Ray Guy, Uzbek food, Kevin Bacon, plus-size models, Pittsburgh… what do the items on this random list have in common? In some nook or cranny of the internet, someone is making the claim that they are “underrated.”

Apparently also underrated? The corporate group at Cahill Gordon, according to the ATL audience. Cahill received the most mentions as having an “underrated” corporate group in our ATL Insider Survey. Biglaw has a fairly stable roster of alpha dogs in each practice category (Weil in bankruptcy, Wachtell in M&A, etc.), but we wondered which firms’ practice groups deserve more recognition. So, among other things, our survey asks attorneys to nominate firms with underrated (and overrated) practices within the respondent’s own practice specialty. Litigators nominate litigation departments, tax lawyers do the same for tax groups, and so on.

Read on and have a look at the top three underrated firms in each practice area:

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Non-Sequiturs: 10.15.12

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Kim Koopersmith

* A firm allegedly said “F**k you” (literally) to a disabled veteran, then suggested his wife should divorce him, called him a crummy soldier, and said he should have died. I can’t imagine this is going to end well. [Simple Justice]

* How do criminal defense attorneys defend those people and sleep at night? [Katz Justice]

* Well, sometimes, those people just might be innocent. Errol Morris wrote a new book (affiliate link) on one such case. I interviewed the Oscar-winning filmmaker about it last month, and Morris just published another grim update. [New York Times]

* Congratulations to Kim Koopersmith, who has been chosen to succeed Bruce McLean as the new leader (and first female chairperson) of Akin Gump. [Thomson Reuters]

* In a further display of total isolation from reality, music publishers have now sued websites that post lyrics to popular songs. Because God forbid fans sing along to their favorite tunes. [IT-Lex]

* By the way, did you know those folks who illegally share music also purchase significantly more music than everyone else? Like, with real money. Something to chew on for a minute or 15. [TorrentFreak]

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How Porn Copyright Lawyer John Steele Has Made A ‘Few Million Dollars’ Pursuing (Sometimes Innocent) ‘Porn Pirates’

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Attorney John Steele is currently suing approximately 20,000 Internet users.

The rather long list of “People Most Hated By The Internet” — that guy who sued The Oatmeal, RIAA, Hunter Moore, Julia Allison, Violentacrez… — would be incomplete were it not to include John Steele. Steele is a lawyer who has partnered with the pornography industry to go after “pirates” who download their XXX films without paying for them. He has filed over 350 of these suits, and says he is currently suing approximately 20,000 people.

The tactic is similar to the one employed by the recording industry years ago to sue people who were amassing huge music libraries through peer-to-peer sharing rather than buying CDs. But where RIAA wanted to scare people out of illegal downloads by getting massive, scary judgments in highly publicized cases against individual Napster users, Steele and the lawyers like him are content to get relatively small settlements from individuals who pay up quietly to avoid being linked by name in public court filings for allegedly watching a film such as Illegal A** 2….

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A Closer Look at the ‘Chaos’ of the American Patent System

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On the day the iPhone 5 became available to the public, I wrote a post asking if the new smartphone might be a sign of the IP apocalypse. I’m not the only one, apparently.

Finally, the rumblings of discontent within the tech and legal industries haved boiled over into the mainstream. The New York Times wrote an extensive front-page story yesterday, chronicling the intellectual property arms race gripping the industry.

A lot of the subjects in the piece may be familiar to Above the Law’s readers. We’ve covered Apple’s schizophrenic attitude towards patents and the America Invents Act (and how it could affect one’s ability to patent bedroom gymnastics).

But let’s take a closer look and put it all in context…

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MegaMeltdown: New Zealand’s Prime Minister Apologizes to Kim Dotcom

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Things continue looking up for Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. A few weeks ago, he finally got some of his assets unfrozen so he could throw some dollars in John Quinn’s direction.

Yesterday, he unveiled the teaser for his new music product, known as Megabox. And this morning, he earned an extensive personal apology from New Zealand’s prime minister. Apparently the Kiwi equivalent of the American National Security Administration had unlawfully spied on Dotcom, and Prime Minister John Key said the “basic errors” involved in the mistake were appalling.

Huh, so that’s what it sounds like when a government isn’t “acting as a proxy for private commercial interests”….

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Who Represents America’s Biggest Companies?

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Each year, Corporate Counsel compiles a list of the firms that the Fortune 100 companies use as outside counsel. These are the firms that corporate clients turn to when they’ve got bet-the-company litigation. From Exxon Mobil to Apple to Walmart, and everywhere in between, these are the clients with the deepest of pockets, and if you care at all about the business end of the law, then this is a list that you should care about.

But this time around, the list looks a little different. Due to the state of the economy, general counsel are now looking for more ways to reduce costs, and are constantly seeking out alternative fee structures. The firms on this year’s list may have been the ones that were most amenable to such changes.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at which firms topped this year’s list….

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