Legal Current

Balancing employee rights with employer's data security needs and data privacy requirements can be tricky.  Anna Suh with Fenwick & West discusses how employers can manage this balance.

Legal departments are increasingly turning to alternative legal service providers to handle certain legal tasks and matters on a more cost-effective basis.  But now, some law firms are also engaging alternative legal service providers to help their client reduce costs and strengthen the firm's client relationships Jeffrey Sharer co-chair of Akerman's Data Law Practice talked at ILTACON 2017 with E...

Brian Kuhn , founder of IBM Watson Legal, addressed key misconceptions around artificial intelligence and cognitive computing in Tuesday's keynote at ITLACON 2017.  Kuhn talked with David Curle, Thomson Reuters director of market intelligence,  and shared insights from business-of-law use case workshops IBM conducted with corporate legal departments and law firms over the last two years. He discus...

Earlier this spring, the Trump Administration released its full 2018 budget proposal, which outlined deep cuts, and even outright eliminations, of some agencies. Among the 19 agencies on the chopping block is the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), an independent nonprofit established by Congress to support low-income Americans with civil legal aid. While the budget for 2017 kept funding in place fo...

Brexit and Cuba may be oceans apart, but they share one common issue: a potential disruption of trademarks in both markets. Jeffrey Greene, a trademark partner with Fenwick & West discusses what issues need to be aware of if they are doing business or plan on doing business there.

Karl Florida, managing director of the small law firm business of Thomson Reuters, talks with David Lat, founder of the Above the Law blog about his experience as a pre-eminent blogger on the legal industry

"Fake news" is nothing new, especially to corporations dealing with short sellers – investors who bet on falling stock prices, who have long been accused of deliberately spreading false information in order to drive bigger gains. But the Securities & Exchange Commission has been surprisingly powerless in dealing with short sellers. Mike Dicke of Fenwick & West, who formerly worked for the SEC, dis...

Soaring athlete contracts, growing TV revenues and cheating and doping scandals. Nope. Not the NFL or World Cup Soccer. It's the burgeoning world of e-Sports or spectator video games.  Video game live televised tournaments and leagues are fast becoming big business.  And with it comes legal issues that are all too familiar for those who follow more established, traditional "ball-and-stick" sports...

A dicussion of the keynote at the 2017 VANTAGE Elite User Conference in Orlando.

Elite's Client Advisory Board is an important source of communications for Elite and its clients to develop innovative ways to improve law firm efficiency. Stuart Robinson, Financial Controller for Irwin Mitchell, the 11th largest law firm in the UK, discusses his role on the Elite Client Advisory Board with Patrick Hurly, VP of Customer Advocacy at Elite.

Millennials are now the largest demographic group in the U.S.  Much has been written and discussed about how millennials often have unique preferences for how they prefer to shop for and purchases goods and services.  How does this apply to law firms?  Christi Krautbauer of FindLaw discusses the findings of a white new paper, Reaching a New Generation: Tailoring Your Marketing Your Legal Marketing...

New Podcast Series on Government: For Public Consumption   Legal Current is proud to present a new podcast series: For Public Consumption .   Hosted by Sharon Sayles Belton, vice president, Government Affairs and Community Relations at Thomson Reuters, this podcast series examines issues that impact government, its services and the people it serves.   In this first installment, Sharon interviews S...

The Ark Group recently held its conference on Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library, Research & Information Services. In this episode of KM with Kim, we discuss a recap of the conference with Kim Stein, national KM manager for Thomson Reuters

With the passage of the America Invents Act in 2011 and a string of Supreme Court decisions in recent years, the landscape for intellectual property filings and dispute resolution was supposed to become clearer.   But they have also brought new issues and uncertainty. Jeremy Taylor with Baker Botts discusses some of the most important IP considerations that are commonly overlooked, or that compani...

In November, Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in State Farm Fire & Casualty Co., United States ex rel. Rigsby, a case involving the False Claims Act and misclassified claims after Hurricane Katrina.  This case is important as litigation under the False Claims Act has grown remarkably in recent years. It also is relevant that the False Claims Act, which dates back to the Civil War, and provid...

ABA TECHSHOW 2017 is this week in Chicago.  ABA President Linda Klein discusses some of the initiatives and priorities for the ABA.

There's no such thing as a typical day for someone who runs knowledge management for a law firm, in the same way that there's no such thing as a typical KM setup, or even a typical person who manages KM for a firm. The person in charge of KM can be anyone from a law librarian to a chief knowledge officer to a practice group leader, a IT manager, or even someone who does a little bit of all those t...

On Jan. 26, 1997, many homes across America were tuned-in to Super Bowl XXXI. While much of the game itself may be a blur, most people who watched that night likely remember one image from that night: Hollywood legend Fred Astaire, who had died nearly a decade before, dancing with an electric broom in a vacuum commercial. While many people were fixated on how the ad was created, some – including m...

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a case this term that could have provided some clarity to the bewildering array on jurisdictions and taxes involved with online sales. Will the move lead to action by the states or Congress, or the potential for even greater confusion? Matthew Hunsaker of Baker Botts discusses.

Managing a successful solo or small law practice means overcoming many challenges. These days, running a small practice requires many skills in addition to being a good lawyer: one often also needs to be a project manager, technologist, marketer and small business expert. The State of the US Small Law Firms Study surveyed more than 300 solo and small law firm leaders to find out how they define su...

Our nation's roads are getting safer. Traffic fatalities and injuries have generally been declining for more than two decades. But law firms that have staked their futures on motor vehicle accident (MVA) injuries or fatalities may face significant business challenges on the horizon unless they prepare now. FindLaw has published a new white paper that analyzes traffic safety data and its implicatio...

Companies in the U.S own an estimated $5 trillion in trade secerts  and about $3 billion is lost due to theft every year    The federal Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 went into effect in May While it's still early to interpret how it will affect trade  secret litigation, some things are clear, especially that federal court  dockets will see an increase in more private trade secrets cases. Chris...

Ark Group recently held its 12th Annual Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession.  The law firm KM toolkit has expanded to include enterprise search, experience location, expert systems, and other collaborative tools — while the remit for some KM practitioners today also includes support for  alternative fee arrangements, process improvement initiatives, and legal project  management. At the s...