Two inventors who were entitled to royalties on the sales of products sued the purchaser of their former company over their royalty rights. The litigation and arbitration took years, and after the third round of arbitration, the arbitrator determined that the inventors were not entitled to compensation from the company…
Statutory fee-shifting is usually meant to incentivize plaintiffs to bring claims involving important rights but relatively low monetary damages. Some statutes provide for fee-shifting not only to successful plaintiffs but also to successful defendants. As the recent decision in the case of Multimedia Sales & Marketing, Inc. v. Marzullo illustrates,…
A disgruntled investor sued the organization that regulates registrations for certain securities brokers after he lost his investment. The investor argued that the securities broker had a history of misconduct dating back more than 30 years and should have had his membership revoked under the organization’s bylaws. The investor claimed…
Many states have passed laws in the past few years taking aim at automatic renewals in contracts such as subscription-based services. As people have found themselves home more and more during the COVID pandemic, the number of subscription services with automatic renewals have exploded. New York recently passed a law…
An AI company harvested publicly available photographs from social media sites across the internet and then used those photographs to derive a biometric facial scan of each individual in the photograph. The company sold this database to law enforcement agencies to use in identifying persons of interest or unknown individuals.…
Pinterest is far from the first tech company to face allegations of gender discrimination, but it is the first to publicly announce that it will be paying more than $20 million to settle those allegations in a recent lawsuit involving a single plaintiff. Françoise Brougher, the company’s former chief operations…
A plastics company purchased ingredients from a producer of rubber products for many years under a series of short-term agreements. A few years after signing a long-term agreement, the rubber producer attempted to unilaterally raise the price of the products it was selling to the plastics company. When the plastics…
Amazon claims it fired Chris Smalls, a management associate, in March for violating safety procedures by continuing to come to work after having been exposed to COVID-19, despite the fact that the company says it offered to pay him to stay home for 14 days after the exposure. Smalls, who…
Everyone knows who Sherlock Holmes is. Even if you haven’t read one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories featuring the famous detective, you’ve no doubt seen, or at least heard of, one of the many adaptations of Holmes and his adventures into other works of fiction, from other books…
If you think you’d be better off leaving your job to start your own company that does the same thing as your employer, you’d better check the terms of your employment contract first. A swimming coach based in New Jersey, John Alaimo, worked for NYS Aquatics Inc. of Goshen, which…