Lateral partner movement continues in the world of intellectual property law. As we noted in Morning Docket, four partners and one of counsel are departing from Finnegan Henderson, one of the leading IP-only firms in the country.
Where are they going? What else is going on over at Finnegan? And what does the future hold for large, IP-focused law firms like Finnegan?
Continue reading “Five Trademark Lawyers Take Leave of Finnegan Henderson”
The Notorious P.O.P.E.
* Like any lawyers worth their salt, attorneys for the Obama administration are wasting precious time and procrastinating on whether they’ll weigh in on the Supreme Court’s Prop 8 case. [Wall Street Journal (sub. req.)]
* The nation’s largest companies, on the other hand, filed a brief with the Supreme Court concerning the DOMA case. Of course, they care more about money than people, but that’s beside the point. [New York Times]
* Lanny Breuer took his sweet time turning in his resignation from the top post of the DOJ Criminal Division, but his acting successor was named quite quickly. Welcome aboard, Mythili Raman. [Blog of Legal Times]
* Francine Griesing, the ex-Greenberg Traurig partner who alleged the firm was a “boys club,” agreed to mediate her claims. Too bad, we hoped something would actually happen with this case. [Legal Intelligencer]
* Hoping to get all your law school applications out before that looming March 1 deadline? Not gonna happen. LSAC’s site has been borked since Tuesday. Take this for the obvious sign that it is! [National Law Journal]
* Surprisingly not from The Onion: the Vatican wants to call the retiring pontiff “Pope Emeritus,” but a California rapper that no one’s ever heard of is threatening trademark litigation to stop it. [Borowitz Report / New Yorker]
A future law student?
* Save for an unintelligible joke made last month, it’s been seven years since Clarence Thomas has spoken during oral arguments, much less asked a question, but with no offense to his colleagues, he’d rather “allow the advocates to advocate.” [Washington Post]
* Sorry, members of the American public, but something like 95 percent of you are too stupid to understand what’s going on during Supreme Court hearings, so there’s no point in having cameras in the courtroom to film them. (Sotomayor, J.) [New York Times]
* “Having an empty bench means people don’t get their cases heard,” but it seems like Senate Republicans could not care less. Obama’s facelift for the federal judiciary is going to have to wait a little while longer. [San Francisco Chronicle]
* A lawgasm for prestige nerds: the Harvard Law Review received federal trademark protection, and with that, the number three law school in the country gained some bragging rights over Yale. [Daily Report (reg. req.)]
* Oh my God, you guys, law school applications are down, no one can find jobs, and recent graduates are in debt up to their eyeballs. This is totally new information that no one’s heard before. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
* Turning to your parents for law school advice is perhaps the worst idea in the world — after all, they’re the cause of your “special little snowflake” syndrome in the first place. [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News]
If you think you can buy this at Costco, your brain probably fits in this box.
If you walk into a Costco, buy a diamond ring, and think you are getting a “Tiffany” ring, you are an idiot and I have no sympathy for you. You deserve what you get and should probably practice breathing through your nose before going out in polite company.
But, luckily, Tiffany wants to stop you from being so easily fooled. Not because they care about you, per se. But because the thought that even one person thinks that Tiffany is selling rings through Costco is horrifying to them. It’s like asking a Penn student if they make it to football games in Happy Valley.
As we mentioned in Morning Docket, Tiffany filed a lawsuit against Costco to protect their brand….
* What to do when your federal agency’s website has been hacked by Anonymous and you’re unable to post a major report online for public dissemination? Well, just ask a law professor to do it for you on his blog; that’s not embarrassing, not at all. [WSJ Law Blog]
* The many victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster can now rejoice, because yesterday, Transocean pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act, and will pay the second-largest environmental fine in United States history to the tune of $400 million. [CNN]
* Money takes flight: eleventy billion Biglaw firms are behind the beast that is this awful airline merger, but taking the lead are lawyers from Weil Gotshal for AMR and Latham & Watkins for US Airways. [Am Law Daily]
* After questioning the validity of one of the NBA players union’s contracts, Paul Weiss is withholding details about it thanks to the government’s intrusion. Way to block nepotism’s alleged slam dunk. [New York Times]
* “When is the last time you took the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street to trial?” Elizabeth Warren took the Socratic method to the Senate Banking Committee and she was applauded for it. [National Law Journal]
* If you liked it, then perhaps you should’ve put a ring on it, but not a Tiffany’s diamond engagement ring that you’ve purchased from Costco, because according to this trademark lawsuit, it may be a knockoff. [Bloomberg]
* “We feel very badly for Megan Thode.” A Pennsylvania judge ruled against the Lehigh student who sued over her grade of C+ because let’s be serious, did ANYONE AT ALL really think he wouldn’t do that?! [Morning Call]
Ed. note: This post appears courtesy of our friends at Techdirt. We’ll be sharing law-related posts from Techdirt from time to time in these pages.
It’s almost that time of year again, when many of us lesser beings will gather together to watch super-human men on all manner of PEDs and deer antler urine sprays smack each other around while an oblong leather ball sits somewhere in the background. We’ll leap for the pizza and chili like salmon during mating season while, between whistles, obligatory commercials with Avatar-like production budgets glow at us. That’s right sports fans, it’s [editor redacted] time!
Wait, hey! What the hell? I said it’s [editor redacted] time! Oh, come on. I can’t say [editor redacted]? Fine, what about a euphamism, like [editor redacted]? No, can’t say that either? Maybe [editor redacted]? Damn it, this is stupid. I’m talking about something that rhymes with “Pooper Hole” (heh, got you, editor!)….
* So, this happened over the weekend: Anonymous hacked the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s website and is threatening to release government secrets about the DOJ (and possibly all nine of our Supreme Court justices) unless the legal system is reformed. [CNET]
* A spoonful of sugar makes the lawyering go down? Apparently the best way to remind lawyers that they need to act civilly is through song. Or through Above the Law posts, but we aren’t in the habit of hosting sing-a-longs like the New York Inn of Court did. [Wall Street Journal]
* “[U]nless there are major changes in the legal industry,” law school administrators shouldn’t expect people to apply in droves, especially when they’re now fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. [National Law Journal]
* Arizona’s Supreme Court will allow people to take the bar exam after two years of study, but come on, the justices don’t want to jump the shark by allowing online law grads take the test, too. [East Valley Tribune]
* Tim Tebow got to trademark Tebowing, so why shouldn’t Colin Kaepernick get to trademark Kaepernicking? All the San Francisco 49ers quarterback wants to do is sell some inevitably overpriced t-shirts. [NBC Bay Area]
* An appeals court threw out two of Casey Anthony’s convictions, but her legal drama is far from over. The ex-MILF filed for bankruptcy to escape nearly $1 million in liabilities, including Jose Baez’s legal fees. [CNN]
* Lanny Breuer’s resignation from his post as the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice is neither fast nor furious enough for his critics. [Blog of Legal Times]
* “I don’t reimburse for taxi and car services around Manhattan.” Judge Martin Glenn is none too pleased with costly expenses billed to the Dewey & LeBoeuf bankruptcy estate by Togut, Segal & Segal, and he’s started slashing fees left and right. [Am Law Daily]
* The Florida Space Coast School of Law? This totally necessary school has a name that no one will ever be able to make fun of. Please let there be an equally necessary space law concentration. [Daytona Times]
* “Being rude is not illegal,” but thanks to The Dirty, it might have some damning consequences for CDA § 230. Maybe it’s a good thing the jurors in this sexy teacher’s defamation case were deadlocked last night. [KY Post]
* Julie Taymor settled her suit against the producers of Broadway’s musical adaptation of Spider-Man. It turns out all the judge had to do was schedule a trial date to get the parties to turn off the dark litigation. [Bloomberg]
* Here’s an example of legal Kaepernicking: the NFL got to flex its muscles when it strong-armed a football fan into abandoning his trademarks on “Harbowl” and “Harbaugh Bowl” in anticipation of the Super Bowl. [ESPN]
If such a shoe exists, the parties have not pointed to it, there is no evidence that Already has dreamt of it, and we cannot conceive of it. It sits, as far as we can tell, on a shelf between Dorothy’s ruby slippers and Perseus’s winged sandals.
– Chief Justice John Roberts, remarking in a recent opinion on the specific degree of fabulosity that would be required for Nike to renege on its covenant not to sue Already LLC for trademark infringement. The Supreme Court opinion can be found here.
A trademark cock-a-doodle-don’t.
We think that the Board did not err in concluding that the distinction between COCKSUCKER and COCK SUCKER is a distinction without a difference. So too the association of COCK SUCKER with a poultry-themed product does not diminish the vulgar meaning – it merely establishes an additional, non-vulgar meaning and a double entendre.
This not a case in which the vulgar meaning of the mark’s literal element is so obscure or so faintly evoked that a context that amplifies the non-vulgar meaning will efface the vulgar meaning altogether. Rather, the mark is precisely what [appellant] Fox intended it to be: a double entendre, meaning both “rooster lollipop” and “one who performs fellatio.”
– Circuit Judge Timothy Dyk, affirming on behalf of a three-judge panel of the Federal Circuit the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s prior affirmance of an examiner’s refusal to register the mark “COCK SUCKER” for rooster lollipops.
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
Keep reading »
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
Keep reading »
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