One of the two attorneys behind the notorious Prenda Law copyright factory has finally admitted extracting more than $6 million from internet users by accusing them of illegally downloading porn, reports Forbes.

John Steele pleaded guilty to federal charges of  conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The U.S. Department of Justice alleged that Steele and co-defendant Paul Hansmeier set up an elaborate “honeypot” operation by buying rights to porn videos in the name of various shell companies and then uploading the videos to torrent sites themselves. They also produced some videos themselves, Steele admitted.

The scheme called for the two lawyers to obtain subpoenas to force internet service providers to hand over IP address of downloaders. Then they would threaten downloaders with financial penalties and public embarrassment unless the hapless victims agreed to pay a $3,000 settlement fee, writes Emma Woollacott.

Read the Forbes article.

Zapproved has published its new E-Discovery Case Law Summaries: 2017 Winter volume, covering the latest trends in applying the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) to address cases involving preservation and discovery missteps.

The volume illustrates what e-discovery pitfalls to avoid and how the courts are bringing issues of proportionality, cooperation and preservation to the forefront. These rulings reflect more nuance in curing prejudice, such as ordering “measures no greater than necessary” and awarding attorney fees and permissive jury instructions, according to Zapproved.

Summaries cover the gamut of cases, from the high-profile U.S. v Volkswagen AG to the quieter Security Alarm Financing Enterprises and Arrowhead Capital Financial. Together, they add up to a snapshot of where courts are leaning and why noncompliant e-discovery practices are dangerous.

This free volume includes quick e-discovery case law abstracts from the last 10 years, plus full summaries of nine recent cases.

Download the new case summaries.

Eolas Technologies, which has been called a “patent troll,” has continued to file against big companies, even after losing a landmark 2012 trial. But following an appeals court order, Eolas will have to pursue its lawsuits in California — not its preferred patent hotspot of East Texas, reports Ars Technica.

Joe Mullin writes that the move could reduce Eolas’ chances of winning a settlement or verdict when the case is heard in a court outside the plaintiff-friendly East Texas system.

Eolas claims rights to a patent on features related to the interactive Web, including online video, user-manipulated images on shopping websites, and suggestions that pop up in search bars. Google defeated the claim in trial. Yet, Eolas lawyers were able to continue to get more patents granted as “continuations” of that original patent, even after a jury invalidated it.

Read the Ars Technica article.

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Bio-Rad Laboratories has agreed to pay $3.5 million in legal fees for the team that represented former general counsel Sanford Wadler during a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit Wadler brought against his former employer, reports MassDevice.com.

The agreement came after a federal jury in California awarded Wadler $11 million in the lawsuit he brought against Bio-Rad. The jury awarded Wadler $2.9 million in back pay and stocks and $5 million in punitive damages, with the back pay award slated to be doubled, bringing the total award to $10.8 million, reports Sarah Faulkner.

“Wadler, who was fired in 2013, alleged that he was let go right before the company was planning to present findings from a bribery investigation in Russia, Thailand and Vietnam. Wadler accused the company of stonewalling his efforts to uncover evidence of similar bribery in China,” Faulkner writes.

Writing about the case on the website of Baker Donelson, shareholder Robert E. Hauberg Jr. explains that the court had ruled Wadler could use as evidence otherwise privileged materials, because the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s protection of whistleblowers pre-empted the attorney-client privilege. (See “Whistleblower General Counsel Prevails Through Use Of Attorney-Client Privileged Information.”)

Read the MassDevice.com article.

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A judge in the Southern District of New York had some harsh words for Holland & Knight lawyers when they filed a response that the judge felt “abused the Court’s courtesy,” reports Above the Law.

Judge Paul Engelmayer last week heard argument on a motion to disqualify Holland & Knight in a dispute between its client, First NBC Bank, and a company called Murex. The judge asked the firm and its client to reflect on the issue and then write a letter informing the court of their final determination, but admonished them that “by extending this courtesy, it was not inviting additional substantive briefing on issues related to disqualification,” writes Joe Patrice.

The firm’s response had made it clear that he didn’t want additional substantive briefing. But that’s what Holland & Knight provided.

In response, the judge gave Murex permission to file a supplemental brief — with no limits on length or substance. He also disinvited HK and their client from filing a reply to Murex.

Read the Above the Law article.

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Image by David Adam Kess

My Other Bag sells inexpensive canvas tote bags that are obvious parodies of pricey designer bags. Luxury handbag maker Louis Vuitton doesn’t get the joke. In a post on its website, Androvett Legal Media & Marketing explains the company filed a trademark infringement suit in New York that was tossed out because the judge said it was clear the canvas bag wasn’t a typical knockoff copy. Earlier this week, an appeals court judge said he wouldn’t reconsider that decision.

Chris Schwegmann, an intellectual property partner at Dallas-based Lynn Pinker Cox Hurst, agrees Louis Vuitton missed the joke:

“This case is very different from most counterfeit litigation. Just by looking at them, the products sold by My Other Bag are clearly not Louis Vuitton bags. That is part of the joke.

“This lawsuit is a cautionary tale that trademark holders need to pick and choose their targets carefully. Sometimes by suing, you bring more attention to the alleged infringer, and in this case, it seems that Louis Vuitton is the butt of the joke. There are several examples of trademark holders sending silly cease and desist letters, only to have the action backfire on them in a very public way.”

President Trump could soon find himself responsible for appointing a greater share of federal court judges than any first-term president in 40 years, in large part because of a growing number of older judges and a stack of vacancies on the federal courts, according to a report in The New York Times.

Most of the vacant seats are on district courts or appeals courts, explains Josh Katz in the article. Many of those seats have been vacant because of Republican obstruction in blocking votes for former President Obama’s nominees, Democrats charge.

“It’s not just vacancies. The federal bench has many judges who are older than 70,” writes Katz. “Federal judges are appointed for life, but at a certain combination of years served and age, they become eligible to accept ‘senior status,’ a form of semi-retirement.

Read the NYT article.

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A day after a Dallas jury found a neurosurgeon guilty of intentionally crippling an elderly woman he operated on, a string of his former patients and co-workers testified in his sentencing trial, reports The Dallas Morning News.

Christopher Duntsch of Colorado has been in jail since his arrest in July 2015, charged with five aggravated assault charges after four of his patients were maimed and two died between July 2012 and June 2013, reports Claire Ballor.

“His trial focused only on a first-degree felony charge: injury to an elderly person. Mary Efurd was 74 years old in 2012 when Duntsch promised to fix her back pain but instead damaged her spinal cord and amputated part of a nerve,” writes Ballor.

Read the Dallas News article.

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Kelley Drye & Warren will present a complimentary webinar Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017, to update participants on recent advertising class actions. The event is part of the firm’s Advertising & Privacy Law Webinar Series. The 60-minute webinar will begin at noon Eastern time.

Consumer class action suits continue to be a growing source of concern to marketers and income for plaintiffs’ law firms. This webinar will provide an update on recent consumer class action cases across a range of industries and provide guidance and strategies on how to knock out a consumer class action.

Kelley Drye partners August Horvath and Jeff Jacobson will lead the discussion.

The webinar will include a discussion of developing cases, the post-Spokeo standing on class actions, and hot-button issues such as the economic models in support of class certification. Speakeers also will discuss the types of cases that are receiving the most traction.

The webinar also will be available later on-demand.

Kelley Drye is an accredited provider of NY & CA CLE. This non-transitional continuing legal education program has been approved for 1.0 NY Professional Practice credit, 1.0 Illinois credit, and 1.0 CA General credit. The firm will apply for CLE credit in other jurisdictions, upon request.

Register for the webinar.

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Exterro has published an e-discovery guide examining must-have and new data collection best practices, which will empower a legal team to create streamlined and cost-saving data collection policies.

The guide is available for free downloading.

The guide includes:

• 19 pages of best practices and innovative, new data collection/processing tips from e-discovery experts.
• 6 chapters on everything you need to know about e-discovery data collections/processings.
• 1 checklist to ensure you are creating an effective, proportional collection process.

Download the guide.

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Members of an invitation-only organization of top trial lawyers have singled out attorney Mark Lanier as its Trial Lawyer of the Year, while recognizing The Lanier Law Firm among the Top 25 most influential litigation firms in the United States.

Lanier accepted the awards at The National Trial Lawyers’ February 2017 Trial Lawyers Summit in South Beach, Florida. In addition, members elected Lanier to the position of president-elect of The National Trial Lawyers; he will serve as president in 2018.

“Lawyers have an awesome charge in our society today and an obligation to use our courts to provide individuals with a level playing field,” Lanier said. “I’m proud of the justice that our firm has been able to attain for our clients, and I’m honored that our efforts have been recognized by ours peers in this way.”

In a release, the firm said:

The national honors for Lanier individually and the firm as a whole follow a string of large, high-profile jury verdicts on behalf of individuals and business interests. Most recently, the firm secured a second significant jury verdict in multidistrict litigation (MDL) against Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary DePuy Orthopedics for injuries caused by defective metal-on-metal hip implants. Jurors returned a verdict of more than $1 billion for six patients who were injured by the defective DePuy implant in December 2016. A fourth MDL bellwether trial, which will involve 10 patients, has been scheduled by U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade in Dallas for September 2017.

The National Trial Lawyers summit included guest speakers addressing legal and business trends and a keynote address by NFL legend Joe Montana.

A federal judge plans to appoint a special master to investigate whether prominent law firms in Boston and other cities padded their legal bills by millions in a class-action lawsuit against State Street Bank, saying the lawyers may have to pay up to $2 million, in advance, to fund the investigation, reports The Boston Globe.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf said he wants a review legal bills submitted by Thornton Law Firm of Boston, Labaton Sucharow of New York, and seven other firms to justify the fees they received from the case last year, writes Andrea Estes.

A Boston Globe review of the records submitted to justify the legal bills showed that three law firms submitted bills for the same lawyers, and often with different hourly rates. And the hourly rates claimed in the firms’ filings, which ranged from $335 to $500 an hour, were often 10 times more than what the lawyers normally earned.

Read the Boston Globe article.

Bloomberg Big Law Business, in partnership with Catalyst, will convene corporate counsel to discuss the need to control rising legal costs particularly related to litigation at the complimentary event, Controlling Litigation Costs – Managing Your Legal Department for Success.

The event will be Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017, 3-5:30 p.m. Central time, at University Club of Chicago, Northwestern Room, 76 E Monroe St., Chicago, IL 60603.

Technology provides important solutions, but only if implemented effectively and as part of an overall strategy to manage litigation, Bloomberg says on its website. Top general counsel will talk about the ways they are managing litigation and the expectations they set with law firms and technology vendors.

Corporate counsel speakers include:

• Susan Lees, Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Allstate Insurance
• Leslie McKnew, VP, Litigation, CISCO
• Matt Miller, VP, Deputy General Counsel – EMEA, APAC and Global Litigation, Groupon
• Sharyn Procaccio, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, Hunt Companies

Register for the event.

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For the third consecutive year, federal judges do not feel the typical attorney has the required knowledge to be effectively counseling clients on e-discovery matters, according to Exterro’s Third Annual Judges Survey.

Exterro has compiled a report on the survey, which can be downloaded.

The report covers:

• E-Discovery advice from 22 federal judges on how to improve e-discovery practices
• Expert commentary from retired judges and e-discovery thought leaders, interpreting the results and how they should effect practices
• Judicial insight on the new FRCP rules and the role judges should play under them

Download the report.

President Trump’s pick to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court is seen by many on the right as a fitting replacement for the iconic jurist that Gorsuch considered a “lion of the law,” reports The Los Angeles Times.

At the same time, Neil Gorsuch also evokes the qualities of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, for whom Gorsuch worked as a law clerk, writes reporter David G. Savage.

“He may be more conservative than Kennedy when it comes to expanding individual rights, but he seems to lack Scalia’s fervor for overturning liberal precedents from decades past,” Savage writes.

Read the LA Times article.

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In 2016, two federal juries in Dallas delivered significant verdicts on behalf of the victims of serious medical complications caused by defective metal-on-metal hip implants made by Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary DePuy Orthopaedics Inc., according to a post by the plaintiffs’ legal counsel, The Lanier Law Firm.

Although the court has reduced the amount of punitive damages awarded by the juries in each case, and those judgments are under appeal by The Lanier Law Firm, the two verdicts still total almost $700 million in actual and punitive damages assessed against Johnson & Johnson and DePuy.

In the post, the firm said these verdicts marked the second and third bellwether trials among thousands of similar lawsuits nationwide that have been consolidated in multidistrict litigation (MDL 3:11-md-0244) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. A bellwether trial is one that is typically representative of all the issues involved in the litigation of a mass tort case.

Read the article.

Days before President-elect Donald Trump was to take the oath to uphold the Constitution, he followed through on a more painful obligation: coughing up $25 million to settle litigation over his defunct Trump University real estate seminar program, reports Politico.

Josh Gerstein reports that Trump University — now known as the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative — transferred the funds Tuesday night, according to two sources involved. The settlement provides enough money pay back about half of the funds paid by students for the seminars.

“Last March, Trump vowed not to settle the long-running litigation — two federal class-action fraud lawsuits and a parallel state court action brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.” writes Gerstein. “The suits accused Trump U. of deceiving students by falsely claiming that Trump knew the instructors and that the school was an accredited university.”

Read the Politico article.

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Zapproved has published the proceedings catalog from the 2016 PREX, the premier conference for in-house e-discovery professionals. The catalog is available for free downloading.

The volume includes reflections shared by participants and faculty about the ongoing challenge of sustainably managing and preserving data to meet e-discovery demands.

It includes a recap of the fireside chat with Hon. Shira Scheindlin led by attorney and professor Maura Grossman; roadmaps for creating the perfect preservation notice and plan; strategies for improving e-discovery process and compliance; and predictions about the future of legal software and its impact on e-discovery. The content also covers the panel review where six judges summed up 10 cases and their key “takeaways” from each one in an hour.

Download the PREX catalog.

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A federal judge has dismissed claims brought by a South Carolina insurance company against Texas-based insurance agency Highpoint Risk Services and its owner, Charles David Wood Jr. , according to a report published by Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

That lawsuit sought more than $40 million in damages for an alleged shortfall in reinsurance collateral and claims relating to the issuance of various workers’ compensation policies. Last week, Senior U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that Companion Property and Casualty Insurance Co. was contractually barred from recovering any alleged shortfall from Wood, the report says.

In dismissing other claims against Highpoint and Wood for alleged breach of fiduciary duty and alleged violations of the South Carolina Unfair Trade Practices Act, the court found that “there is no evidence Highpoint (or Wood) owed or breached” a fiduciary duty to Companion in connection with the issuance of Companion’s workers’ compensation policies.

“The court has dismissed the core of the case brought by Companion,” said Michael Gardner, name partner at Dallas-based law firm Gardner Haas and counsel for Wood and the defendant companies. “An insurer cannot avoid the terms of its own policies and can’t complain when its agreements are given their clear and natural effect.”

Companion, purchased by Enstar Group in 2015, now operates as Sussex Insurance Company and remains headquartered in Columbia, S.C.

Photo by Brian Solis

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, testified Tuesday in a trial that could cost his company $2 billion if a federal jury in Dallas finds that a company bought by Facebook stole technology that eventually went into a virtual reality headset.

A New York Times report on the trial says the “dispute started more than two and a half years ago when ZeniMax Media sued Oculus just months after Facebook announced that it would acquire the start-up. ZeniMax accused Oculus of stealing important elements of the technology that went into the creation of the headset, eventually including Facebook among the parties it was suing.”

Reporters Nick Wingfield and Mike Issac write that this case defied predictions by reaching a jury trial.

ZeniMax’s case is based on the idea that one of its former employeesshared ZeniMax virtual reality technology with a founder of Oculus, during the company’s early days, technology for which ZeniMax was never compensated, according to the report.

Read the NYT article.