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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The U.S. House of Representatives has approved the Natural Gas Pipeline Permitting Reform Act bipartisan bill (H.R. 161), legislation that could speed up the permit process for the construction of natural gas pipelines, reports Pennsylvania Business Daily.

Co-sponsored by Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA), the bill seeks to eliminate permit regulations that are hindering the extraction, transportation and distribution of shale gas.

The bill now must be voted on by the U.S. the Senate.

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Wells Fargo & Co. recently snagged two former Bank of America Corp. high-ranking lawyers to fill openings in its litigation and workout division, the bank confirmed, reports The Wall Street Journal‘s Moneybeat blog.

Craig Baldauf, a former Bank of American interim director of litigation and regulatory investigations, plans to join Wells Fargo on Feb. 23 as a deputy general counsel, the San Francisco-based lender said. He most recently served as head of global litigation for Toronto-based TD Bank Group, after leaving Bank of America in 2011.

Bob McGahan, former associate general counsel of litigation and regulatory inquiries at Bank of America, joined Wells Fargo Jan. 20 as an assistant general counsel.

Moneybeat says both will work on litigation and regulatory matters across the bank.

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The U.S. Supreme Court declined Jan. 26 to hear an appeal by a former BP Plc executive who contested whether he can be charged with obstruction of Congress for downplaying the severity of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Reuters reports.

Prosecutors say David Rainey, the company’s exploration vice president, misled members of Congress over the amount of oil spilled in the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident.

Reuters says Rainey’s legal argument on appeal was that the government missed the deadline to file an appeal after a district court judge dismissed his obstruction charge.

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Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer hired Jay Jorgensen in 2013 to help overhaul a company badly shaken by allegations its executives regularly bribed officials in Mexico to speed up store construction. Jorgensen, Global Chief Compliance Officer, says Walmart has spent $100 million over the past two years hiring thousands of employees to work on compliance, reorganizing its corporate structure, training workers and rolling out new technology.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Justice Department continue to investigate Walmart, according to a report in SFGate.

Walmart now trains contractors on the company’s ethics policies and requires them to sign contracts requiring them to follow U.S. law.

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Courts weighing whether union retirees have vested lifetime health-care benefits should apply ordinary contract principles, rather than special inferences or presumptions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, Bloomberg BNA reports.

The unanimous Jan. 26 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas is largely a win for employers, which may now have more freedom to alter, reduce or eliminate the health-care benefits they provide to retired union workers.

Bloomberg BNA says the court invalidated what has become known as the Yard-Man inference, a judicial inference applied by the retiree-friendly U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to find that retiree health-care benefits are vested for life in the absence of specific language to the contrary in a plan document or collective bargaining agreement.

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Performance-based contracting received a boost this month when the Government Accountability Office found that the U.S. Department of Transportation is making progress in moving toward a national performance-based approach, reports Forbes.

In Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21^st Century (MAP-21), the DOT recognized the importance of a more progressive approach in the way federal agencies and states do business with each other, with planning organizations and with private vendors.

Accordinng to the Forbes report, in the fiscal year 2013, DOT provided about $50 billion to states and other “grantees” — such as metropolitan planning organizations and transit agencies — to support highway and transit infrastructure and safety.

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Pipeline operator Energy Transfer Partners LP said it would buy affiliate Regency Energy Partners LP for about $11 billion as master limited partnerships seek to simplify their complex holding structures, reports Reuters.

Regency shareholders will receive 0.4066 of an Energy Transfer unit and 32 cents in cash for each unit they own.

Energy Transfer Equity owns the general partner and incentive distribution rights of both Regency and Energy Transfer Partners. Energy Transfer Partners Chief Executive Kelcy Warren is also the chairman of Energy Transfer Equity, according to the Reuters report.

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Law firm DLA Piper plans to get into the cybersecurity business, a rapidly changing field that is pushing the legal industry to experiment with ways to help businesses dealing with the complexities of security regulations, reports The Washington Post.

The law firm plans to create a new subsidiary, Blue Edge Lab, its first foray into non-legal work.

Blue Edge Lab consists mainly of a subscription software service called CyberTrak, which will be sold to companies for $25,000 a year, The Post reports.

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Encana Corp. has announced the appointment of Joanne Alexander as its new executive vice president and general counsel.

She replaces retiring GC Terry Hopwood at the Canadian energy company

The company says Alexander has more than 20 years of legal and business experience in the oil and gas industry. Before starting at Encana, she was the senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary with Precision Drilling Corporation.

Read Alexander’s company bio.

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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Kinder Morgan will pay $3 billion for pipelines in the Bakken Shale, the company said Wednesday in a flurry of news that also set the date for a key executive transition and reported the first financial results since last year’s corporate restructuring.

Kinder Morgan said it will buy pipeline company Hiland Partners from its founder, Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm, in a deal that includes $1 billion in debt. The transaction will give Houston-based Kinder Morgan a foothold in the North Dakota-centered Bakken, which executives described as one of the most profitable oil and gas plays in the U.S., reports The Houston Chronicle.

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The U.S. Supreme Court appears likely to review whether the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission must seek conciliation with employers before suing them for violating federal law, reports Business Insurance.

The high court heard oral arguments last week in a case in which a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled unanimously in 2013 that employers cannot use the EEOC’s failure to seek conciliation as a defense, the site reports.

The EEOC had alleged in EEOC v. Mach Mining L.L.C. that the company discriminated against women in its hiring practices.

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North American Windpower has published an article discussing a new notice from the Internal Revenue Service setting performance and quality standards that small wind turbines must meet in order to qualify for the 30% investment tax credit.

David Burton, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, wrote the article about Notice 2015-4, released by the IRS on Jan. 13.

To qualify as a small wind turbine, the turbine must have a nameplate capacity of 100 kW or less and meet any performance and quality standards specified by the Secretary of the Treasury, after consultation with the Secretary of Energy, Burton wrote. The Secretary of the Treasury has delegated this authority to the IRS, which often prefers to issue notices rather than promulgate regulations as the issuance of a notice has fewer procedural hurdles.

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The U.S. Supreme Court altered the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s longstanding de novo standard of review for all claim construction in patent infringement cases on Jan. 20 in Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc.

Morgan, Lewis & Bockius reported on its website that the Supreme Court instead instructed the Federal Circuit to use a hybrid approach: When reviewing a district court’s subsidiary factual findings that relate to extrinsic evidence, the Federal Circuit must now apply a “clear error” standard of review, but when reviewing a district court’s findings based on evidence intrinsic to the patent, the Federal Circuit will continue to apply de novo review.

The ultimate question of construction will remain a legal question.

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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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The U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 20 declined to take up a challenge by retailers to the Federal Reserve’s controversial rules for debit card “swipe fees,” according to a Reuters report.

Businesses pay the fees to banks when customers use debit cards to purchase goods or services. The fees reimburse banks for costs involved in offering debit cards.

Reuters says the high court’s rejection of the appeal means a March 2014 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that upheld the rules stays intact.

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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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Nearly 51 percent of the 450 financial reporting executives polled at KPMG’s 24^th Annual Accounting and Financial Reporting Symposium pointed to the specter of future regulations as a key concern, with another 16 percent citing the navigation of current regulatory compliance issues as a top worry. Tax compliance (22 percent), and data infiltration and IT security (11 percent) also were identified as leading concerns.

“In this heightened environment of regulatory guidance, it is critical that companies understand the current and pending compliance issues, and the ripple effects on many aspects of their business operations,” said Thomas Duffy, KPMG’s national managing partner for Audit.

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