From the monthly archives:

March 2008

One poisoned water bottle: Paul O’Neill explains the subprime mortgage crisis

March 28, 2008

From the March 30 NY Times Magazine’s interview with Paul O’Neill, former secretary of the Treasury: [NYT:] It’s so hard to understand how the subprime mortgage crisis has triggered a financial crisis of global proportions. [Paul O'Neill:] If you have 10 bottles of water, and one bottle had poison in it, and you didn’t know [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Supreme Court nixes expanded judicial review of arbitration awards (but stay tuned ….)

March 26, 2008

Yesterday the Supreme Court rejected the view that parties to an arbitration agreement, at least under the Federal Arbitration Act, can agree to expanded judicial review of the arbitrator’s award. See Hall Street Assoc., L.L.C. v. Mattel, Inc., No. 06-989 (U.S. Mar. 25, 2008) (hat tip: SCOTUSblog).  I’ve put a more detailed write-up at the [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Signing a contract without indicating it’s for your company can get you sued personally

March 24, 2008

I recently ran across a case from California where: • a company officer signed a letter agreement, on his company’s letterhead, but with no indication of his title; • the company backed out of the deal; • the other side sued both the company and the officer in his personal capacity; and • the company’s [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Layoffs – advice for GCs on how to manage them

March 24, 2008

Dallas lawyer Michael Maslanka writes in Texas Lawyer about how to manage layoffs, including suggestions for drafting litigatable releases (hint: simpler is better, and no release is better than a spurned one). Here’s the drill: If offering two weeks severance only, forget the release, and just give the money. A release offered and refused is [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Source code escrows usually aren’t worth the bother

March 19, 2008

escrow “source code escrow” software “license agreement”

0 comments Read the full article →

Invention ownership – watch out for automatic assignment language in the employment agreement

March 18, 2008

A subsidiary of Major League Baseball was able to throw up, at least temporarily, a complete roadblock to a computer scientist’s patent infringement lawsuit. It turned out that the computer scientist, a Dr. Barstow, had previously signed an employment agreement with his former employer (which apparently wasn’t otherwise involved in the infringement suit). That agreement [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Law firms as feudal baronies

March 18, 2008

Law-firm consultant David Maister certainly seems to know big law firms: Listen to David Maister from his new book, "Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy," in which he writes that having a collection of great lawyers is not the same as having a great and effective organization. Rather, he writes [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

The blog is back, with a new name

March 18, 2008

After a hiatus of nearly four years, I’m reviving the By No Other blog and renaming it 100 Feet Up. I’ll be using it again to post notes on technology- and business-law topics, ones that wouldn’t really fit at the Pactix Web site.  I got the idea for the new name from an old lawyer [...]

0 comments Read the full article →