Bond Airport Financed Leases
November 29, 2004
The United Air Lines bankruptcy case has spawned several reported decisions, at the bankruptcy court level, the district court level and the circuit court level.
Creating An Effective Deal Database
November 22, 2004
Managing the life cycle of a transaction, whether an offering, a financing or a merger, requires an attorney to seek information from disparate sources within the firm. These searches are often inefficient, time-consuming and may not always yield the required data. The firm can use knowledge management (KM) techniques to build a one-stop repository of transaction data to help attorneys manage a transaction from pitch to press release.
Everything But the Kitchen Sink
November 22, 2004
You've just pulled a steaming pepperoni pizza from the oven and open a kitchen drawer to look for the right tool. Will any tool do? They're all kitchen…
Business Development Driver: Leverage Knowledge Management
November 22, 2004
Knowledge management (KM) has about as many definitions as it does implementations, and in law firms it was recognized early on as a tool to help lawyers in supporting their clients. Lots of paper, information, and knowledge to manage ' and robust document management systems emerged as KM solutions. That's fine for the lawyers, but in marketing and business development, it's who you know as much as it is what you know. At Duane Morris, where our Marketing and Business Development Department is only 3 years old, we were able to grow this functional area around the key information and processes needed to be successful.
A Lesson in CRM: What Matters to Lawyers Are Matters
November 22, 2004
Client relationship management (CRM) applications succeed within the law firm environment when they address both the organization's strategic needs, as well as the user's individual needs. These systems also relieve lawyers from the manual drudgery of managing and calculating their billable hours. Both the organization and individual lawyers obtain obvious value from these systems. Win-win. <br>But with so many CRM products in the marketplace with varying capabilities, there seems to be a growing disconnect between the strategic value that firms enjoy from these solutions, and the benefits derived by individual lawyers. The challenge therefore becomes one of focus.
Design-Around Patent Strategies for Patentees and Competitors
November 09, 2004
Patentees and competitors must take proactive steps to handle design-around issues related to intellectual property matters. Using a design-around strategy, a competitor can produce an equivalent product that is legally non-infringing on a patentee's issued patent. Successful design-around strategies can present time and cost savings in terms of research and development costs, legal fees and potential litigation costs and also can minimize the delay in commercializing an equivalent product. For example, by designing around, a competitor has the incentive to potentially capture a significant market share by producing an equivalent product while undercutting the patentee's profits.
News Briefs
November 08, 2004
Highlights of the latest franchising news from around the country.
Forecasting Claims in an Era of Tort Reform
November 08, 2004
Forecasting mass tort claims is often based on sophisticated models applied to large, complicated databases. These models can account for such causal factors as the size of the exposed population, the dose-response rates between defendant's product and disease, and actuarial mortality rates of the exposed population. Too often, though, there is one variable that is simply extrapolated into the future at historical levels with no attempt to understand its causal influences — the filing rate (also called the propensity to sue).
Insurance Coverage for Antitrust Claims
November 05, 2004
Many insureds face claims of antitrust violations, anticompetitive conduct, unfair competition, and theft of trade secrets. Too often these businesses fail to consider that they may have a very valuable asset to protect them against the expense, and any settlements or judgments, incurred in such lawsuits ' their comprehensive or commercial general liability ("CGL") insurance policies.