Ryanair accused Booking.com of several CFAA violations based upon Booking.com, through a third-party partner, accessing the password-protected "myRyanair" portion of the Ryanair website. Ryanair alleged, and the jury found,...more
Ohio- Enforceability of Arbitration Agreement- Bryan Costin v. Midwest Vision Partners LLC., 8th Dist. Cuyahoga No. 112651, 2024-Ohio-463. The Eighth District Court of Appeals recently affirmed the trial court’s ruling...more
A federal court in Massachusetts has dismissed franchise claims brought against a manufacturer, concluding that the distributor had failed to identify a franchise fee that would qualify it for protection from non-renewal...more
At the beginning of the pandemic, concerns were raised that trade secret misappropriation might take a new form. Indeed, with large swaths of the workforce working from home, spouses, roommates, or others living in the same...more
Ohio- Tortious Interference with Business Relations Emanuel’s LLC v. Restore Marietta, 4th Dist. Washington No. 2023-Ohio-147. In this appeal, the Fourth Appellate District affirmed the trial court’s decision to grant...more
A federal magistrate judge in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, in a trade secrets dispute involving CBD-based pain cream, recently granted summary judgment in favor of all but one...more
Out of Exodus? The California Supreme Court has held that a contracting party cannot be held liable in tort for conspiracy to interfere with its own contract. Applied Equipment Corp. v. Litton Saudi Arabia Ltd., 7 Cal....more
A federal appeals court reversed dismissal of a claim against a barbeque restaurant franchisor. The court found that, despite having signed releases in favor of the franchisor, a former franchisee had valid claims for...more
During an interview with Bloomberg TV on March 6th, Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, observed: “Economic time has stopped but financial time has not stopped.” An incisive summary as any of the current...more
On March 3, 2020, Massachusetts Premier Soccer LLC, doing business as Global Premier Soccer (“GPS”), filed a complaint in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleging that two of its former...more
In a narrow but notable holding, the Ninth Circuit recently held that the data mining company hiQ won the balance of hardships and identified sufficiently serious merits questions to warrant a preliminary injunction against...more
Twenty years ago the effort to sequence the human genome turned into a race between a consortium of publicly funded institutions and a company called Celera, with Craig Venter at its helm. ...more
Smith Jamison Constr. v. Apac-Atlantic, Inc., 2018 N.C. App. LEXIS 132 (N.C. Ct. App. Feb. 6, 2018) - General contractor APAC-Atlantic (“APAC”) hired Smith Jamison Construction (“Jamison”) as a subcontractor to perform...more
In a meaty decision involving the intersection of restrictive covenant and franchise law, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio recently denied a request by D.P. Dough Franchising, LLC (“D.P....more
Below is a summary of some of the significant legal and regulatory actions that occurred over the past week. This alert is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all such developments, but rather a selection of...more
Reversing a 2-1 decision of the North Carolina Court of Appeals, the state’s Supreme Court held unanimously that an assets purchase-and-sale contract containing an unreasonable territorial non-competition restriction is...more
Companies and employers around the country seek to protect their intellectual property by, among other things, using non-compete provisions in employment agreements. Generally, these provisions are intended to prevent an...more
There are indeed limits to the reach of the anti-SLAPP statute, particularly in the trade secret context. In West Hills Research and Development, Inc. v. Terrence M. Wyles, a California appellate court ruled that engaging in...more
DSM Desotech Inc. v. 3D Systems, Inc. - Applying the laws of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in an appeal that no longer contained a patent claim, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit...more
In our last two posts, we identified best practices for ensuring that a company’s house is in order, including the use of narrowly tailored restrictive covenant agreements (Part I) and adopting a company culture and behaviors...more