The business of commercial litigation finance is making inroads in the United States, after it was pioneered in Australia and spread to Britain, reports Crain’s New York Business. Litigation funders pay upfront legal costs for plaintiffs or their lawyers in return for a share of a settlement, judgment or verdict down the road.

The finance firms portray themselves as white knights as they help entrepreneurial firms that retain them to wage battles against bigger, better-funded companies that steal their intellectual property, renege on contracts or commit fraud or other offenses against them.

“Many litigation-finance firms are backed by hedge funds, private-equity firms, family offices and other investors who sink millions into these funders, betting on returns that are not correlated with the ups and downs of the stock market.” Crains reports.

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A Fox Rothschild LLP litigation team wona victory for client Coventry II DDR/Trademark Montgomery Farm LP, concluding a years-long dispute that originated in a bankruptcy case, according to an announcement from the firm.

Partners Mark Goodman and Michael Rumac led the team.

“In the case, a Texas attorney represented a client against Trademark and filed proceedings seeking sanctions and to hold Trademark in contempt of court for violating the bankruptcy stay,” the firm says on its website. “Not only did Trademark defeat the contempt claims (which were also successfully defended in the first Fifth Circuit appeal) but also, Trademark flipped the tables on [the opposing lawyer] when the court sanctioned her and her firm.”

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Microsoft has announced in a statement that the company and Samsung Electronics have settled a contract dispute over patent royalties.

Microsoft sued Samsung last year in a federal court in New York, accusing Samsung of breaching a collaboration agreement by initially refusing to make royalty payments after the U.S. company announced its intention to acquire Nokia’s handset business in September 2013, reports Reuters.

“The lawsuit claimed Samsung still owed $6.9 million in interest on more than $1 billion in patent royalties it delayed paying. Samsung has countered that the Nokia acquisition violated its 2011 collaboration deal with Microsoft” Reuters says.

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The TASA Group Inc., in conjunction with transportation and traffic engineer Dr. Carl Berkowitz, PE, present a complimentary on-demand webinar examining the problem of railroad grade crossing accident, which occur in this country every two hours.

“There are approximately 220,000 railroad crossings in the United States, of which approximately 137,000 cross public roads. A collision between a train and a motorist at a grade crossing occurs approximately every two hours,” TASA says. “Half of the crossing accidents happen where there are active warning devices, and more than 60 percent of accidents occur where train speed is less than 40 mph. Approximately 20 percent of accidents involve cars running into trains.”

During the program, Dr. Berkowitz discussed:

* Components of a Grade Crossing
* Factors Influencing Highway-Railroad Grade Crossing Safety
* Reducing Highway-Railroad Crossing Incidents
* Future Directions in Railroad Crossing Safety

Watch the on-demand webinar.

A Delaware jury on Feb. 6 ordered Symantec to pay $17 million to Intellectual Ventures, the Washington-based “invention marketplace” created by ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, which boasts more than 30,000 patent assets, according to a report by Ars Technica.

In its verdict [PDF], the jury found that Symantec had infringed two US patents, numbered 5,987,610 and 6,073,142. A third patent, 6,460,050, was found to be not infringed.

Ars Technica says the complaint [PDF], filed in 2010, accuses Symantec’s Brightmail Gateway and Web Gateway of infringing the ‘142 patent. That patent was filed in 1997 by Utah’s Park City Group and essentially describes a system for distributing e-mail according to a set of predetermined “business rules.”

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Environment & Energy Publishing tells the story of a Texas-based law firm has spent the past year rounding up potential clients in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania for mass litigation against Chesapeake for shorting royalty owners on payments.

The Oklahoma City-based natural gas producer has generally maintained that its royalty calculations are perfectly legal and that royalty owners have just misunderstood how their contracts work, E&E Publishing says. Nevertheless, royalty owners have sued the company in every state it has operations, resulting in a mixed bag of wins, losses and settlements.

“The royalty owners and their attorneys are adamant that Chesapeake is shortchanging them. In a recent Pennsylvania lawsuit, attorneys even accuse the company of racketeering — raising much-needed cash by selling assets to Access Midstream Partners LP and agreeing to pay the company high prices to move natural gas, then passing those costs to the royalty owners,” E&E Publishing reports.

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Portland, Oregon-based Daimler Trucks North America reached a $2.4 million settlement with six former employees who last year filed civil rights complaints alleging violent threats and racism in the workplace, reports The Oregonian.

An investigation included interviews with more than 60 current and former Daimler employees and supervisors and review of hundreds of documents pertaining to the Portland truck manufacturing plant’s operations.

Daimler agreed to compensate employees for damages and comply with measures to ensure workers are free of harassment and discrimination in the workplace, according to The Oregonian‘s report. Among the measures, the company will install a civil rights complaint hotline for workers and train at least two managers to conduct internal investigations addressing any future incidents.

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iCONECT Development, LLC, a technology leader that develops intuitive, web-based eDiscovery software and Nuix, a technology company that enables people to make fact-based decisions from unstructured data, announce they have competed delivery of “Direct to Database” (D2D) integration between Nuix eDiscovery and iCONECT-XERA.

From within the Nuix eDiscovery Workbench, Nuix users can now automatically create an iCONECT-XERA database and transfer extracted document data for review.

The near-complete elimination of manual inputs enables a much faster data migration process than was previously possible, iCONNECT says on its website.

“Our testing shows a 60% reduction in the amount of administrator time spent compared to the traditional import-export process,” says Iram Arras, iCONECT’s Vice President, Product Strategy. “The automated database configuration process also reduces errors and time spent correcting mistakes.”

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ReposiTrak has posted a free on-demand webinar on Walmart’s 2014 settlement of 23 cases in the wake of the Jensen Farms class action litigation due to an outbreak of listeriosis linked to cantaloupes.

Walmart’s play that day in court sets precedent that retailers now may be viewed as stepping into the shoes of the manufacturer and are now on the hook when things go wrong in the supply chain, ReposiTrak says on its website.

This webinar discusses this precedent setting settlement and what a retailer or wholesaler can do to protect brand and reduce liability.

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Ropes & Gray has published an examination of a recent 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on the False Claims Act (FCA) in United States ex rel. Badr v. Triple Canopy, Inc., No. 13-2101.

As the firm described the case, private security company Triple Canopy, Inc. contracted with the government to provide security services at a U.S. military airbase, then falsified its employees’ marksmanship scorecards to cover up their failure to meet the required qualifications. Although the district court had dismissed the government’s claims, the 4th Circuit reversed, and in so doing it adopted the “implied certification” theory of FCA liability and issued an important decision analyzing materiality as related to that theory, the firm reported.

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Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, facing gender-bias claims by ex-partner Ellen Pao, may not get access to her performance reviews, complaints about her and other personnel records it sought from her other employers in a case that has focused attention on discrimination in Silicon Valley, reports Bloomberg News.

The report says Pao asked a state court judge in San Francisco to block demands Kleiner sent to social media company Reddit Inc. for those records and documents relating to an anonymous letter Kleiner’s lawyers said urged them to question Reddit workers about run-ins with Pao.

In a tentative ruling Jan. 20, Judge Charles Geerhart said the firm’s subpoenas targeting records at Reddit, where Pao works now, and BEA Systems Inc., where she was before joining Kleiner, were overbroad or not relevant to the case. Pao’s lawsuit is scheduled for trial on Feb 17, Bloomberg News reports.

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The National Law Journal has posted a list of five questions that every general counsel should consider in the wake of the Sony hacking.

The hacking episode — as well as recent favorable rulings for the plaintiffs in class action lawsuits pending against Target — have brought cybersecurity to the forefront of many corporate boards’ and general counsel’s agendas in the coming year.

The Journal says the focus will only increase in light of the legislative proposals. This is a complex topic that crosses multiple legal disciplines and business functions, and cybersecurity risk-mitigation requires thorough planning tailored to the particular data, business practices, and infrastructure of an organization, taking into consideration the threats facing the organization.

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Sears and Overstock will have to pay software development company Droplets Inc. $15 million for patent infringement, a Harrison County, Texas, federal jury decided Friday.

The case began Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas-Marshall Division with U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap presiding, according to a report in the Marshall News-Messenger.

The report said the jury of six men and two women rendered a verdict in favor of Droplets, ordering e-commerce site Overstock to pay Droplets $4 million and Sears to pay $11 million for directly and indirectly infringing on Droplets patents. Droplets was seeking a royalty of $32 million.

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DLA Piper has posted a paper about a $185 million punitive damages award won by a plaintiff in a pregnancy discrimination suit.

Joseph Domenick Guarino and Kevin Connelly wrote that Rosario Juarez began as a retail salesperson in San Diego at AutoZone in 2000. She was promoted to Parts Sales Manager but was unsuccessful in seeking advancement to store manager until she complained of discrimination and threatened a lawsuit. Her career became even more difficult after she became pregnant in 2005.

After she gave birth, she was demoted and later fired.

At trial, a jury set punitive damages at $185 million, more than 200 times the compensatory damages award and $25 million more than Juarez’s attorney asked the jury to grant in punitive damages

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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.

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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.

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Battle lines are being drawn over last year’s Delaware court ruling that lets companies shift legal fees to investors bringing lawsuits, reports Pensions & Investments.

At the center of the fight is the Delaware Supreme Court decision in ATP Tour Inc. et al. vs. Deutscher Tennis Bund, upholding the corporation’s right to unilaterally amend its bylaws to make unsuccessful shareholder litigants personally liable for legal expenses, even if they prevailed on some, but not all, of the issues.

Pensions & Investments says that, although ATP Tour is a private company, at least 50 public companies added similar bylaws to their governing documents after the ruling, according to a list compiled by law firm Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check LLP, which represents institutional investors in securities litigation.

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Steptoe & Johnson has posted a complimentary on-demand webinar discussing the inter partes review (IPR) process in multi-defendant litigation.

In district court litigations involving multiple defendants, coordinating a successful defense strategy almost always involves a discussion of the IPR process, the firm says on its website. Should the defendants decide to file an IPR, a coordinated presentation of the evidence is required to optimize success at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. But defendants often disagree on many issues associated with filing the IPR, including when to file, how best to present the arguments, what references to use, and who should join.

The firm says the webinar is a discussion of some successful (and not so successful) strategies multiple defendants can use when filing an IPR, as well as how these strategies may affect the concurrent district court litigation.

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A former president of Baltimore-based First Mariner’s mortgage division has sued his ex-employer, seeking compensation totaling more than $1 million.

Edward Perry’s suit alleges he was fired without cause Aug. 19 and immediately escorted out of First Mariner, reports The Baltimore Business Journal. The plaintiff also claims the bank didn’t pay him 30 days’ worth of his $325,000 salary promised in a series of employment agreements he signed. The suit also claims he has been denied a full success bonus of up to $750,000.

The Business Journal reports:

In addition, Perry’s suit says he has effectively been banned from working in his field since his dismissal. His employment agreements with First Mariner included two-year, 100-mile non-compete clauses. The bank has refused to certify him able to take a new job with two other companies that offered him positions, it says.

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