SOUTHEAST TEXAS RECORD

Intellectual property has often been contentious as legislators try to balance the rights of intellectual property owners against progress and innovation. There is a fine line between promoting innovation and propping up monopolies to the detriment of competition, and poorly written, executed, or interpreted laws can promote poor policy. Most notoriously, this is seen with the rise of patent trolls, who do not really produce anything, but amass portfolios of patents for the purpose of suing alleged infringers and demanding licensing fees to keep products on the market. While some studies suggest that trolling activity has declined in recent years, trade secrets have emerged as a new avenue for filing lawsuits and extracting revenue through the legal system rather than innovating and creating new products.

As many of our daily activities have moved online due to the novel coronavirus, so have criminals. And one of their targets is our children.

Outside of the lawyers who watch such things, few Americans know that later this week the Supreme Court will be discussing a number of cases regarding the use of police power by local government officials and qualified immunity. Qualified immunity and how it should function in society is an important issue deserving of a fair debate. Today, I offer this article as a brief in its defense.

When the U.S. Department of Justice—at the direction of Attorney General Bill Barr—announced on May 7 that it was dropping all charges against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor’s years-long legal nightmare finally ended. The nightmare began on January 24, 2017, when hyper-partisan FBI agent Peter Strzok (subsequently fired), acting on the instructions of FBI Director James Comey (subsequently fired), improperly met with the newly-appointed National Security Advisor at the White House—without counsel and on a pretense—to conduct an “ambush” interview lacking any legitimate investigatory predicate. Comey later acknowledged that the FBI took advantage of “chaos” in the early days of the Trump administration by deciding not to coordinate with the White House Counsel or the DOJ before conducting Flynn’s interview.

Failing local newspapers unconvincingly use the Wuhan virus crisis as an excuse to feed at the public trough

Any Imposition of Liability Related to the Coronavirus Must be Based on Standards that Recognize these Extraordinary Circumstances

By the time that they graduate law school and pass the bar, young attorneys have just closed out two long decades of schooling. The shift from studying law to actually practicing law can seem a bit intimidating and leaves a lot of new attorneys wondering if they are doing anything right.

Hey, have you heard the one about the injured Georgia man who rented a malfunctioning Bird e-scooter that flung him into an Atlanta street, but whose case was tossed out of court because of the fine print in his rental contract? Yep, that just happened.

The Equal Rights Amendment, a topic I’ve previously discussed in the form of a retrospective on Phyllis Schlafly, is back in the news. The occasion for this déjà vu is the newly-woke Virginia legislature’s recent ratification of the measure, which was proposed by Congress way back in 1972. The ERA pre-dates Saturday Night Fever, Charlie’s Angels, and the death of Elvis! In January, the Democratic majorities in the Old Dominion’s statehouse purported to give the ERA—long thought to be moribund—a new lease on life when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it.

From conception through enforcement, our trade secret laws seek to foster a secure environment for invention while also serving as a yoke on unscrupulous commercial behavior.

You’ve heard of nuclear explosions and the nuclear option. Nuclear verdicts? Maybe not. But as the name implies, we should all be wary of them.

The critically-acclaimed comedy, The Good Place, comes to an end this month and that’s too bad. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s about the afterlife. There’s not just a Good Place. There’s also a Bad Place, populated by demons wearing expensive suits who torture and destroy things. My first thought was, “who does that remind me of? Oh yeah, the property/casualty insurance industry. They torture their policyholders and try to destroy businesses." They'd be perfect for this show. If only there were another season.

On January 1, a law took effect in the union stronghold of California that poses a dire threat to the so-called “gig economy” by drastically restricting the use of independent contractors, upon which many tech companies depend. The law, referred to as AB 5, was apparently directed primarily at transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft, which treat their drivers as contractors instead of employees. AB 5, which was promoted by labor unions wishing to organize the drivers, sought to remove the legal impediment of IC status by effectively banning the use of contractors in California. Instead of forcing Uber and Lyft to capitulate, as intended, the overly-broad law has backfired by also threatening long-established practices in the trucking industry, and even the livelihoods of freelance writers in the Golden State.

We’re commuting longer hours. Boeing plane crashes are in virtually every news cycle now. Amtrak is being sued for forcing its passengers to waive their right to go to court. Pennsylvania Turnpike motorists just experienced a horrible crash involving buses, trucks and cars, killing 5 and injuring dozens. As we start off this year, we are wondering just bad it is for commuters and business travelers these days?

The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted a lawsuit issue that has increasingly become a problem in many states, including Texas: litigation against trucking companies.

The dynamic nature of our tech sector fosters a flow of new startups entering markets constantly. The speed at which companies can collaborate and innovate can significantly influence which may be the next Apple or Google and which will fail in their first year. These innovations, often the result of tireless investment in R&D, are frequently safeguarded through our system of intellectual property – through protections like patents and trade secrets.

This week, a federal court jury convicted Rudy Delgado, a suspended justice on the Texas 13th Court of Appeals (Corpus Christi) of eight criminal charges stemming from his acceptance of bribes, violation of the Travel Act, and obstruction of justice when he was a state district judge.

Each month, we like to feature one of our attorneys to help you get to know our team better. We sat down with one of our Houston attorneys, Larry Wilson, to talk about his background in the legal field and what he is currently working on.

Asbestos has been killing Americans - and industries have been covering up asbestos disease - since at least the early 1900s. (See the complete story here.) Nearly the entire industrialized world bans asbestos but not the United States. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find this lethal substance making news yet again, yet we genuinely are.

Everyone should have the right to use the courts. Even Amtrak. We know that U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) shares this sentiment.This week, he introduced a bill called the Rail Passenger Fairness Act, which would give Amtrak the right to “sue freight railroads if it believes that they are failing to give preference to passenger rail operating on their rail lines.”