A departing employee makes a copy of your company’s proprietary software and you think he intends to provide it to his new employer – a competitor. Perhaps your business is software development and you want “insurance” that your customers will stop using your product if you terminate their licenses. Maybe you paid an independent developer to create software for your business and you want assurance that your competitors will not be able to use the same program. For these reasons and more, you want to own the copyright  to proprietary software and must register it with the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to get the protection you… Read more

If you are or will become a business person, knowledge of trademark basics will be extremely valuable. A trademark serves three functions. First, it is an indication that all goods identified by the mark come from or are sponsored by the same source. Second, the mark is a guarantee of the uniform quality of the goods it identifies. Third, the mark serves as an advertisement, for without trademarks there could be no advertising. Conducting availability searches for trademarks before branding your products or adopting a business name could result in the selection of a more protectable mark or name, and could avoid future claims of infringement. Understanding… Read more

The phrase “Here Be Dragons” harkens back to the medieval practice of adding depictions of dragons, sea serpents and other creatures in uncharted areas of maps to denote dangerous territory. The seas of advertising are also fraught with peril – of the non-mythical type. Investigations conducted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), complaints filed with the National Advertising Division (NAD)1 and false advertising/unfair competition lawsuits loom and await the unprepared and ill-informed. Penalties for false or deceptive advertising include injunctive orders, civil and monetary penalties, consumer redress and corrective advertising and mandated disclosures in future ads. Awareness of the key principles of advertising law is a crucial part of rigorous self-review that may steer you and… Read more

Sandra Day O’Connor, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Vera Wang, Katie Couric and SGR’s Kristen Lewis have more than their gender in common. Each of these women is among the 80 percent of the 59 million Girl Scout alumnae who attribute their personal and professional success to Girl Scouting. As the nation’s premier leadership development organization for girls and young women, Girl Scouts currently boasts 3.2 million active members aged 5 to 18, and almost one million adult volunteers who support the delivery of the Girl Scout Leadership Experience (GSLE). Kristen herself was a Girl Scout from age 5 to age 16, as part of Troop 23 in the Hudson Valley Council in upstate… Read more

The Challenge: Balancing supply, demand and budgets When it comes to the water supply, the increasing demands of citizens and industry must be met within the constraints of state and local government budgets. Although providing for future demand has direct and immediate economic impacts on present planning decisions, demand predictions are based on many uncertain assumptions regarding economic, social, political and climatological factors. Such uncertainties pose a major challenge for the planners and policy makers charged with providing water for present and future generations and finding balance among objectives for water security, economic growth, cost control and quality of life. The conventional approach to the increasingly acute water supply challenge has… Read more

Products liability is a complicated area of the law that governs who, when and how someone who has been harmed by the use of, or exposure to, a product can receive compensation. Products liability defendants include manufacturers, distributors, retailers and equipment refurbishers. Although the absence of federal reform of products liability law means that there probably will never be complete uniformity among the 50 states on how products liability issues are confronted, chances are that if you design, manufacture, assemble or distribute goods, as opposed to providing services, you could find yourself involved in a products liability suit. The product involved can be almost anything man-made. Products are usually either capital goods, such… Read more

Beginnings The Baltimore & Ohio, which began as a 13-mile stretch of track in 1830, is generally recognized as America’s first railroad.1 However, the first cars on the Baltimore & Ohio were drawn by horses and thus hardly qualified as what most people think of as trains.2 The first American-built steam locomotive, Best Friend of Charleston, which pulled its first train for the Charleston & Hamburg railroad in December 1830,3 met a tragic end six months later when it became the first steam locomotive in the U.S. to suffer a boiler explosion.4 The explosion was apparently caused when one of the engine’s firemen, annoyed by the whistle produced by the steam pressure release valve,… Read more

Trusts & estates attorneys who advise wealthy families and their businesses are frequently asked to highlight the indelible characteristics that will help the family enterprise navigate tumultuous events and stay true to its mission and thrive. Unfortunately, many families often become intoxicated with the acronyms that promise to mitigate the pain of impending estate taxes at the expense of ignoring other important family and business planning issues. Similar to television commercial advertisements that sound too good to pass up, many affluent families become consumed with such tax structures as FLPs, QPRTs, GRATs, CLATs and IDGTs, to name just a few…. Read more

The subject of digital estate planning first gained widespread exposure in 2005 when Yahoo! refused to provide the family of a deceased U.S. Marine, Justin Ellsworth, access to his e-mails. The Ellsworth family ultimately secured a court order forcing Yahoo! to hand over the contents of the son’s e-mail account to his father. Despite the ruling, however, Yahoo! refused to reverse its policy, citing privacy concerns. The company also stated that the family of a deceased user would have to petition a court to verify the family member’s identity as well as their relationship to the deceased user. As we… Read more

INTRODUCTION **The year was 1990. Lacking jurisdictional grounds to get into federal court, and unable to convince the clerk of the state court that this misappropriation of trade secrets case was inappropriate for the state court’s pilot mediation program, a young lawyer with the initials J.K. and her clients marched into the state courthouse with the goal of convincing the mediator to pressure the other side to settle. She had little experience in mediation or arbitration, thinking the former was a game of “let’s make a deal” and the latter was simply “rent-a-judge.” JK held out little hope that the… Read more