JD Supra

On July 14, 2014, the Court in United States v. University of Nebraska at Kearny (No. 4:11CV3209) took a significant step in support of Federal Rules 1 and 26. Magistrate Judge Cheryl R. Zwart denied plaintiff’s motion to compel defendants to use plaintiffs’ proposed search terms to cull electronically stored information (ESI) for review and production. The Court’s order effectively discharged defendants’ obligation to produce any ESI. And the Court issued this order notwithstanding both that 1) the parties had agreed to a stipulation summarizing protocol for the production of ESI shortly after the outset of the case, and 2) plaintiff previously produced ESI as part of its production to defendants’ discovery requests. In short, plaintiffs’ unwillingness to fairly compromise as to the breadth of search terms aimed at reasonably limiting the scope of ESI production came back to bite.

The CFPB has issued a white paper on the manufactured housing market, including how manufactured housing is financed and the types of consumers who purchase or rent such housing. In the paper’s introduction, the CFPB explains that although manufactured housing only accounts for six percent of all occupied housing and a much smaller fraction of U.S. home loan originations, such housing is of interest to the CFPB because it is a source of affordable housing particularly for rural and low income consumers and may raise consumer protection concerns due to the nature of the retail and financing markets for such housing. The report relies on publicly available data, including HMDA data, proprietary data voluntarily provided to the CFPB and information obtained through outreach to industry groups, consumer groups, government agencies and “a variety of market participants and observers.” The paper’s key findings include:

Returning from a trip to West Africa with some college buddies, Ben X. Posed, a waiter at Chotchkie’s, showed up for work with a fever, muscle aches, a strong headache, and stomach pains. Begging his boss Dee Manding for the rest of the day off, Ben complained of his aches and pains and told of his overnight stay where one of the villagers recently died from Ebola. Dee Manding refused any time off explaining he was short-staffed. The next day Ben was hospitalized with a confirmed case of Ebola. Are Dee Manding and Chotchkie’s liable if other employees, or patrons, contract Ebola?

The workplace that we know today is rapidly changing. Competition for highly skilled workers is fierce, employees have become more mobile (due, in part, to alternative work arrangements or outsourcing), and there are often several generations of employees working alongside one another with different workplace approaches and perspectives. Developing employee benefit and compensation programs that are meaningful to a diverse group of workers with varied needs will become increasingly more challenging. This month’s Take 5 discusses the following five high-level issues to consider in shaping your organization's employee benefit offerings:

The discovery of electronically stored information (ESI) is loaded with potential pitfalls and failure unless the parties add two components to the mix: cooperation and collaboration. Lacking those components, ESI discovery, at least sometimes, can be one of the more painful experiences for the average trial lawyer. The problem to overcome is largely that trial lawyers, by their nature, are competitive souls and tend toward competition rather than cooperation. Add to this personality that of the client who expects her lawyer to win everything, every time and we are off to the races. In a recent case, the Honorable Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen seems to deal with overly competitive parties and lawyers not inclined toward collaboration; in the recent decision in Progressive Casualty Insurance v. Delaney, 2014 WL 2112927 (D. Nev. May 20, 2014).

n the U.S District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Judge Matthew F. Kennelly recently held that plaintiffs alleging price-fixing in the text messaging market were not entitled to an adverse inference after failing to prove that defendants T-Mobile and CTIA destroyed emails in bad faith. Judge Kennelly also granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, as plaintiffs were unable to meet the elevated pleading burden for collusion to fix prices for text messages in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The plaintiffs had filed suit on behalf of customers who used pay-per-text-message services from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The Wall Street Journal published an article in September 2008, titled “Text Messaging Rates Come under Scrutiny,” inspired primarily by the antitrust investigation of Senator Herbert Kohl.[1] The day the article was published, a T-Mobile employee allegedly sent the text of the article via e-mail to both Adrian Hurditch, the company’s former Vice President of Services and Strategic Pricing, and Lisa Roddy, the company’s former Director of Marketing Planning and Analysis. Hurditch and Roddy e-mailed each other about the article; however, that e-mail thread no longer exists.

Here are the ten firms with the biggest income disparities within their partnerships, and the five firms with the most equal distribution of profits.

Some updates on the Dewey bankruptcy case, plus a post-mortem on the firm from an industry expert.

How can you get some free advertising for your law practice? By following these five easy steps...