Usually winners in lawsuits count up their take and go home. They don’t ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take another look. So the National Football League received plenty of attention when it asked the high court to review an antitrust decision that gave it the exclusive right to license sales of caps, T-shirts and other memorabilia bearing league and team insignias to a single supplier—rather than open the deal to more vendors. But the justices accepted the case and could forever alter the way professional sports leagues do business. Arguments in American Needle Inc. v. NFL are scheduled for…

Masked by the Web’s anonymity, Internet users feel free to flame celebrities, blast politicians, or blow the whistle on employers for corporate misdeeds. Burned by the postings, many plaintiffs resort to defamation suits. But in addition to the usual litigation issues, plaintiffs often find another one: plenty of defendants with the same name, John Doe. “If we don’t know who they are, we don’t know where they are and we don’t necessarily know what court to file in,” says Gary Nissenbaum of Union, N.J., managing principal of Nissenbaum Law Group, which practices Internet law in New Jersey, New York and…

Release of a new version of windows is always big news, and the arrival of Windows 7 on the heels of the perceived failure of Windows Vista makes it especially noteworthy. It’s a good sign that comments from the large and lengthy beta test period and the early reviews have been quite positive for Windows 7. Reviewers say the new operating system is what Vista should have been, that it fixes the issues in Vista—even that it is the most “Mac-like” version, which sounds like faint praise. In this article, we will take a look at ways to consider what,…

Note: Register for this month's CLE, "Real Estate Law: No Commercial Break," from 1-2 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Jan. 20. Not so long ago, General Growth Properties Inc. was a classic success story. The company had morphed in 55 years from a family-owned grocery business in Iowa to the second-largest owner of shopping malls in the United States. The Chicago-based company’s roster of more than 200 malls included such marquee establishments as Water Tower Place on the city’s Magnificent Mile, Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, South Street Seaport in Manhattan and Honolulu’s Ala Moana Center, the largest open-air shopping center…

Soliman Al-Buthi has never read Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The absurdist novel chronicles the last months in the life of banker Joseph K., who is arrested, hauled into court, condemned and put to death without ever learning the charges against him. Al-Buthi doesn’t need Kafka. That’s because he’s living a variation of Kafka’s theme in a San Francisco federal courtroom. Al-Buthi served as a director of an Islamic charity that’s suing the National Security Agency—an intelligence-gathering organization run by the U.S. Defense Department—for eavesdropping on privileged telephone conversations between him and his lawyers during the first half of 2004 without…

The year Laura Tharney entered law school, the legal market boomed with opportunity. But those good times ended before she could finish. The week she graduated from Rutgers School of Law-Newark, the New Jersey firm that had offered her a job eight months earlier rescinded that offer. A snapshot from the class of ’09? Think again. Tharney, now deputy director of the New Jersey Law Revision Commission, graduated 18 years ago into the early 1990s legal recession, which hit hardest on the East Coast. Then as now, firms cut associates, canceled summer programs and rescinded offers as part of their…

Needing a break after a workday spent on white-collar insurance fraud defense matters in New York City, Matthew Litt started reading printouts of archived 1945 newspaper articles on his ride home on the subway, years ago. A politics major in college, the now-32-year-old New Jersey lawyer says he didn't even consider reading about current news to relax. "I was working long hours as an attorney ... and I tried to think of what I thought was the happiest time in American history," he tells the ABA Journal. The correct period to pinpoint, he decided, was Christmas of 1945, just after…

For the second time in a week, BlackBerry smart phone aficionados today had to contend with an interruption of service reported by users but not confirmed by Ottawa-based Research in Motion Ltd., the maker of the device. The glitches today and Tuesday apparently precluded customers from sending and receiving e-mails for several hours, regardless of which according to the Post Tech blog of the Washington Post. As in earlier outages in 2007 and 2008, users managed, somehow, to cope, but it wasn't necessarily easy: "My whole life is based on my BBM," says Robert Hagler. The 46-year-old Alabama attorney noticed…

Known for its lucrative corporate bankruptcy practice, Weil Gotshal & Manges is showing associates the money after a year of unprecedented layoffs, pay freezes and even pay cuts at a number of well-known law firms. Associates with "overall strong" ratings by the firm will receive bonuses of between $7,500 and $35,000 at the end of January. And top-performing associates in the classes of 2001 to 2005 can get between $30,000 to $50,000 if they are ranked as "distinguished," reports Above the Law, relying on a copy of what it says was the memo distributed to Weil associates by Stephen Dannhauser,…

With $1.4 billion in liabilities and $42 million in assets, according to court filings, the now-defunct Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm obviously isn't doing well in the wake of an alleged $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme by former attorney Scott Rothstein. And of that $42 million, $23.9 million represents loans and debts dating back as far as 2005 that are owed by individuals and other parties including a number of partners, reports the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Originally, the firm was owed $34.8 million, but about $11 million has been repaid. The newspaper article details some of the loan amounts, including ones…