Regulation

Features

Record-breaking budget shortfalls have caused states to search outside the box for revenue-raising tools that many argue are unconstitutional and violate the consumer privacy that online shoppers have come to expect. Today, with so much of retail activity conducted over the Internet, states are struggling with revenue losses stemming from this constitutional restriction. States are reacting by becoming ever more creative in their attempts to capture this lost revenue by adopting new laws aimed at circumventing the Commerce Clause restrictions.

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While the ACLU and other nonprofit legal groups have been declared exempt from a strict proposal for regulating lawyer Web sites, Florida's largest law firms are starting to band together to protest the regulations, largely on First Amendment grounds.

Features

Sweepstakes and contests have become popular in mobile promotion. However, because sweepstakes and contests are highly regulated, a marketer using a mobile device must comply not only with mobile-messaging laws and regulations, but also with those governing sweepstakes and contests. Indeed, text messaging as a sweepstakes-entry method has brought much consumer litigation in recent years.

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The Supreme Court has sided with former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in limiting the use of a federal fraud law that has been a favorite of white-collar crime prosecutors.

Features

This edition of the Quarterly State Compliance Review looks at some legislation of interest to corporate lawyers that went into effect from May 1 through July 1, 2010. It also looks at recent decisions of interest from the courts of Delaware, New York and California.

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The practice of project management in e-discovery has traditionally been loosely defined, with significant variation in the application of the fundamentals and the people performing these services. In some cases, the individual taking a project management role on a case is an attorney or paralegal, while in others it's the e-discovery services provider's account manager. Some project managers come from IT or document management roles. Within any given case, multiple "project managers" may work together, each applying their own set of practices and procedures.

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Talk about winning on a technicality. In a copyright infringement case brought by photographers who sued Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. over the allegedly unapproved use of their photos, Chief Judge Loretta Preska of Manhattan federal district court ruled in May that the works at issue had not been properly registered. Judge Preska threw out most of the photographers' claims in her 24-page ruling.

Features

Those of us involved in e-commerce pay particular attention when online sellers are involved, such as the report that the same e-seller sold a gun or accessories to two well-publicized killers. This year, however, there is an additional legal twist.