Riker Danzig will present a complimentary morning seminar updating on Site Remediation Jan. 29, from 8 a.m. until 11:50 a.m. Eastern time. The live seminar will be at the Westin Governor Morris, Morristown, NJ.

Businesses, industry, developers and lenders — and their Licensed Site Remediation Professionals (“LSRPs”) — continue to face new challenges in remediation, redevelopment and financing, and litigation over contaminated sites, Riker Danzig says in its invitation to the seminar. Although practice under the Site Remediation Reform Act and LSRP Program is maturing, new issues continue to emerge and the regulatory landscape is evolving and changing.

The live seminar will include:

• Update on the NJDEP Site Remediation Program, Assistant Commissioner Mark Pedersen (invited)
• Developments at the LSRP Licensing Board
• Regulatory compliance and practice tips
• Discussion of the N.J. Spill Act, off-site and comingled plumes and recent litigation.

The attorneys in the firm’s Environmental Practice Group, among the foremost practitioners on these topics, will discuss these subjects and provide an ample question and answer session.

The program is being submitted for approval for CEC credit by the Site Remediation Professional Licensing Board and CPC credit by the State Board of Professional Engineers.

For practicing attorneys, this program has been approved by the Board on Continuing Legal Education of the Supreme Court of New Jersey for 3.6 hours of total CLE credit. This program has been approved for 3.5 New York CLE Credits.

Please call 973-538-7278 ext.7558 with any questions.

Register for the seminar.

Compliancy Group will present a complimentary webinar discussing the difficulty of reaching full compliance with HIPAA.

The webinar will be Wednesday, Jan. 28, from 2-3:30 p.m. CST.

Apple Inc. and Ericsson AB are suing each other in U.S. courts after failing to reach an agreement over the pricing of wireless-technology patents used by the maker of the iPhone and iPad, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Apple, saying that Ericsson is seeking excessive royalty rates, asked a federal court in California Jan. 12 to rule that Ericsson’s patents aren’t essential to long term evolution, or LTE, standards. Stockholm-based Ericsson said it filed a complaint in a district court in Texas, asking for a verdict on whether its fees are fair, Blomberg reports.

Ericsson helped pioneer the mobile-device market with its handsets in the 1990s but sold its mobile-phone business to Sony Corp. in February 2012, five years after Apple introduced the iPhone, which is now its largest revenue source.

Read the story.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers presents a free on-demand webinar on small modular reactors could be built in factories and shipped to wherever reliable low-emission electricity is needed.

The U.S. has nearly 100 nuclear reactors, and they are all big – and have a large capital cost, says the ASME on its website. But a new concept in nuclear power could make it easier to build and finance new reactors. Small modular reactors could be built and shipped  for less cost than conventional large nuclear plants.

Jose N. Reyes, Chief Technology Officer at NuScale Power, and Paul Murphy, special counsel at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, discuss the technological, economic and regulatory promises and challenges regarding small nuclear reactors.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Opower has made available a complimentary on-demand webinar discussing how behavioral design can be a powerful tool across different industries including energy efficiency providers.

In the utility sector, behavior design can be instrumental in motivating customers to take action on saving energy and participate in efficiency programs at a higher rate, Opower says on its website. “Whether you’re working to encourage customers to turn down their thermostat, sign up for a new rate plan, or purchase a more efficient appliance, applying behavioral design to your communications is a proven strategy to help you achieve greater results,” the site says.

The webinar covers:

•    Behavioral design principles that are proven to influence consumer behavior
•    Learn why communications that look similar often yield different results and how you can achieve your desired outcomes
•    Dynamic, targeted user experience approaches will keep customers active and engaged
•    Best practices from behavioral design case stories from multiple industry types

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Ecova will present a free webinar to discuss the results of a survey of more than 500 energy and facility professionals. The webinar will be Thursday, Jan. 29, at 2 p.m. EST.

The goal, according to Ecova’s website, is to inform and share best practice expertise into the areas that represent the most opportunity and greatest challenges.

Topics wil linclude trends that illustrate the evolution of energy and sustainability management, insights into what your peers consider their biggest challenges and opportunities, and short- and long-term elements to include in 2015 planning.

Register for the webinar.

MetLife Inc., the U.S. life insurer deemed by regulators as too big to fail, engages in in practices that threaten national economic health, according to a lawsuit filed by a policyholder, reports Bloomberg News.

MetLife, the biggest U.S. life insurer by assets, made misleading statements about its financial condition and overstated the amount of reserves it maintains to absorb unexpected losses or financial shocks, according to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court by policyholder Andrew Yale.

MetLife “is engaging in conduct that imperils the financial future of Metropolitan Life’s policyholders, their beneficiaries, and the public at large,” Yale said in his complaint.

Read the story.

A pair of Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate have re-introduced legislation aimed at preventing the abuse of offshore tax havens by multinational companies, reports Accounting Today.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, a senior member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Senate Budget Committee, introduced the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act on Monday. The bill would close a number of offshore tax breaks, eliminating many tax incentives for U.S. companies to move jobs and operations offshore, and modifying the rules on corporate inversions for businesses dodging U.S. taxes.

Doggett and Whitehouse introduced similar legislation in 2013, Accounting Today reports.

Read the story.

While there may be an array of cloud technologies available to businesses, not all companies are embracing those services, new research shows.

Business News Daily reports that just 33 percent of companies are moving “full steam ahead” with their cloud services plans, according to a study from the Cloud Security Alliance. More than 40 percent of businesses are adopting cloud technology, but with caution; 15 percent are still in the early stages of investigating what’s out there; and 11 percent aren’t placing much of a priority on them, the survey found.

Security of data is the top concern, with 73 percent of businesses saying it’s their biggest cloud challenge.

Read the story.

Can the Federal Bureau of Investigation wire up your longtime company counsel and then use recordings of the conversations against you in court? The answer – as reported in The Wall Street Journal‘s Risk & Compliance Journal – is often yes, according to legal experts and a ruling by a New Jersey federal judge.

Joseph Sigelman, the ousted chief executive of oil services firm PetroTiger, was seeking to have a secretly recorded conversation with his former general counsel turned informant, barred from his coming trial for foreign bribery. Sigelman, who maintains his innocence, argued that the secret video recording made with a camera attached to the lawyer Gregory Weisman, who also sometimes served as his personal attorney, violated his right to attorney-client confidentiality, The Journal reports.

Read the story.

GovWin has published a free white paper on the top government contract set-asides for the current fiscal year.

The top ten federal set-aside opportunities for FY 2015 list consists of prime 100 percent set-aside contract opportunities from an array of federal departments and multiple industries, GovWin says on its website. The FY 2015 top ten set-aside opportunities total over $21 billion.

Jennifer Sakol, Principal Analyst with Deltek Federal Information Solutions, wrote the report.

Download the white paper.

Piliero Mazza has posted a free white paper analyzing the Small Business Administration’s proposed rule to implement provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 (NDAA) that change the way firms calculate compliance with the limitation on subcontracting rule on small business set-asides.

SBA’s proposed rule also proposes changes dealing with the nonmanufacturing rule, including affiliation and joint ventures, among other topics.

The memorandum summarizes the key provisions of the proposed rule. Comments are due to SBA on, or before, February 27, 2015.

Download the white paper.

Sometimes negotiators care so much about the issues at stake that they mistake compromise for surrender, says the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Sometimes they’re so confident things will go their way they don’t try hard enough.

The program’s list of the 10 Worst Negotiations of 2014 includes talks that failed for one or both of these reasons, as well as for numerous other lapses. “As we reflect on the shortcomings of 2014, let’s learn from the past and strive to negotiate more rationally in 2015.” the program says on its website.

Read the story.

Crowell & Moring has posted the slides from a recent webinar on the recent ASBCA decision in Laguna Construction, which is likely to reverberate in 2015 and beyond. This case introduced the doctrine of “antecedent breach” in the ASBCA as a means of denying legitimate contractor claims.

In Laguna, after the completion of the contract, the contractor submitted a $3 million claim based on a dozen separate task orders under a large IDIQ contract, the firm explained on its website. Mid-way through litigation, two contractor employees pled guilty to receiving kickbacks from subcontractors on some, but not all, of the Task Orders at issue in the litigation. The Government then added Fraud as an affirmative defense at the Board, arguing that Laguna’s entire claim should be denied because Laguna’s employees had pled to Fraud on some of the Task Orders.

See the presentation.

A free, Web-based seminar focusing on the recycling and disposal of fluids from oil and gas drilling will be offered by Penn State Extension’s Marcellus Education Team.

The webinar, from 1 to 2 p.m. EST Jan. 22, will feature Karen Johnson, chief of the Ground Water and Enforcement Branch of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 3. She will discuss the Underground Injection Control program in Pennsylvania and current underground injection well activity.

While much of the fluid from oil and gas drilling is recycled, there still are residual fluids that must be disposed of properly,Penn State says on its website. One means of disposal has been underground injection wells. In Pennsylvania, injection wells of all types are regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act by the EPA.

Register for the webinar.

Epiq Systems has posted a complimentary on-demand webinar on using social media as evidence, and best practices for collecting from social media and mobile data types for use in electronic discovery. Kelley Drye & Warren lawyers participated in the event.

The event covers the preservation, authentication and collection of evidence related to social media, and its importance as it has become a big part of the evidentiary landscape in recent years.

The presentation also covers retention policies, cost concerns, technological limitations, possession, control or power, relevance, privacy, and more.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Susan K. Hatmaker, Esq. of Hatmaker Law Group will present a free webinar discussing steps to take now to avoid employment claims in 2015.

The event will be Wednesday, Jan. 21, beginning at noon Pacific time.

Participants can join this webinar in their office or conference room with colleagues.

Hatmaker Law Group’s webinar serve as educational opportunities for employers, owners, managers, accountants, attorneys and human resource professionals to stay current with up-to-date information on important California employment law issues.

Register for the webinar.

A free on-demand webinar frames the history of the net neutrality debate and then explores the current proposed rules and the public response they have generated. The event is a Rocket Matter webinar with Michael Weinberg, a Vice President at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit digital advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

The webinar also puts the debate in the larger context of innovation on the internet and explain how you can get involved.

Over one million net neutrality comments have been filed with the Federal Communications Commission on the proposal that would allow cable companies to charge content providers extra fees to deliver faster service.

Watch the webinar.

Over the past five years, law firms in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston have put online – for free – the documents that startups need to execute basic legal transactions.

Tech Crunch reports that new sites Cooley GO and WHLaunch join first-movers Founders’ Workbench and Start-Up Forms Library, to enable entrepreneurs to incorporate their company, secure early-stage financing, hire employees and compensate them with stock options. SeriesSeed.com has emerged as an industry standard for documenting seed investments, and StartupCompanyLawer.com offers answers to over 100 frequently asked questions, along with a term-sheet generator.

Read the story.

When Elon Musk, who loudly disdains the traditional auto industry, makes his first public appearance in Detroit in two years on Tuesday, it will be easy to see how much has changed since then, The Wall Street Journal says in a new post.

In a speech Tuesday at an auto-show event, Musk is expected to criticize larger auto makers for not responding to Tesla even more aggressively. He denounces the rest of the industry as only halfheartedly trying to produce battery-powered cars for the masses, not just early adopters.

The Journal says Tesla is worth $26 billion in stock-market value, nearly half the size of GM or Ford Motor Co.

Read the story.