Ten groups of top technology, media and business organizations on Dec. 15 filed legal briefs in support of Microsoft’s argument to a federal appeals court that the U.S. government cannot issue a search warrant to obtain customers’ e-mails held in another country, reports The Washington Post.

The unusually high number of friend-of-the-court briefs and the breadth of groups that signed on reflect how significant the issue of privacy in the digital age is to U.S. industry.

Apple, Amazon and HP, as well as news organizations from across the political spectrum like CNN, Fox News, NPR and The Guardian, have all signed amicus briefs supporting Microsoft’s fight to keep its users’ emails away from the U.S. government.

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Some former employees of Sony Pictures Entertainment have filed a suit forcing the company to defend the security measures it took in advance of the hack.

The complaint was filed on behalf of Michael Corona, who says he worked at the company from 2004 to 2007, and Christina Mathis, who says she worked at the company between 2000 and 2002. Both say they had information such as social security numbers leaked, reports The Hollywood Reporter.

The report continues:

The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys at the law firm of Keller Rohrback who are demanding actual and statutory damages, restitution and disgorgement for causes of action that include negligence, health privacy and a California statute requiring notifications of data breaches. They haven’t estimated the value of the damages, but they are also demanding equitable relief including forcing Sony to provide credit monitoring for at least five years, identity theft insurance, credit restoration service and requiring Sony receive periodic compliance audits by a third party regarding the security of its computer systems.

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PetSmart agreed on Sunday to sell itself to a group led by the investment firm BC Partners for about $8.7 billion, months after the retailer came under pressure from two hedge funds, reports The New York Times.

The agreement represents the biggest leveraged buyout of an American company of 2014.

JPMorgan Chase and the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz advised PetSmart. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Ernst & Young provided advice, while Citigroup, Nomura, Jefferies, Barclays and Deutsche Bank provided debt financing.

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AMB Group LLC,  parent company of the Atlanta Falcons, has appointed Mike Egan as general counsel, effective Jan. 5, 2015.

Egan is a partner in the Corporate Practice Group of King & Spalding LLP and is co-head of the firm’s Mergers and Acquisitions Practice.

Egan will serve as operational executive of the new Atlanta stadium construction project, representing the interests of Atlanta Falcons Stadium Company, reports The Atlanta Business Journal. His legal responsibilities will span all of the AMB Group companies.

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Billions of tax dollars are squandered in the United States every year because of a decades-old loophole in federal law that allows tens of thousands of businesses to do the wrong thing – simply because they’ve been doing it all along, reports the News  Observer.

The safe harbor rule, officially known as Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978, allows many companies can identify their workers as independent contractors for tax purposes even though the workers are, in fact, employees.

“Under the safe harbor rule, the company just has to have a “reasonable basis” for doing so,” the News & Observer reports. “Generally, companies must just show they’ve been doing it this way all along and that others in their industry do it the same way.”

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The National Labor Relations Board is getting ready to issue an onslaught of law-changing decisions as we head into the holiday season, predicts The National Law Review.

This onslaught of change likely will be hastened by the departure of Board Member Nancy Schiffer, whose term is set to expire Dec. 16.  So, keep an eye out as of December 18 when the decisions are likely to be posted on the NLRB’s website, The Review suggests.

In the article, the Review says:

The NLRB Division of Advice has answered a question that has been the subject of many charges since the Board’s decision in Alan Ritchey, Inc., 359 NLRB No. 40 (December 14, 2012), where it held that in cases where a union has recently secured representational rights, the employer has a duty to bargain over discretionary aspects of discipline before imposition until an initial contract is reached. The Board’s decision in Alan Ritchey was invalidated by the Supreme Court earlier this year, yet the agency still applies its rationale as if nothing happened to the underlying case.

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The federal government doesn’t have a system that can help pair small business subcontractors with prime contracts, and existing contract-tracking systems aren’t up to the job either, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

FCW reports that connecting small business to prime contracts matters because federal law requires prime contractors to make good-faith efforts to award a portion of their subcontracts to small businesses, and in some cases to have small business subcontracting plans.

In a report released Dec. 11, GAO said it assessed the feasibility of using existing federal contract-reporting systems to connect small business subcontractors with prime contracts, and identified actions federal agencies are taking to help in the effort, FCW reports.

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The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that asks whether a company discriminates by refusing to provide a simple accommodation to an expectant mother.

The ABA Journal reports on the case of Peggy Young, who was a part-time delivery driver for United Parcel Service when she became pregnant in 2006. She sought an accommodation from her employer based on a fairly standard restriction imposed by her doctor: no lifting of anything greater than 20 pounds in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy and nothing more than 10 pounds thereafter.

But UPS told Young that company policy did not permit light duty for pregnant drivers because an essential function of the job was to be able to lift up to 70 pounds, the Journal reports.

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When patent attorney Michael Sander and his colleagues started noticing that some judges on the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) were rejecting more patents than others, Sander built a predictive tool that tells an attorney with a new PTAB case his chances of success, based on an instant, computer analysis of every similar case handled by the same judge, Wired reports.

Interest in the PTAB analytical tool has grown quickly, especially because there’s no competition.

Another example of using technology for trial strategy cited by Wired is the case of three law professors who are developing a tool that’s predicting Supreme Court decisions with about 70 percent accuracy. The professors assume the tool will eventually be put to use for the lower courts, since there’s such a strong need for it.

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The National Labor Relations Board ruled on Thursday that employers could not prohibit employees from using their company’s email to communicate and engage in union organizing on their own time, The New York Times reports.

The 3-to-2 ruling overturned a decision made in 2007, when Republicans held a majority on the board, that had forbidden such use of email.

The current majority, noting how technology has transformed daily habits, called that ruling “clearly incorrect,” according to The Times report. “The workplace is ‘uniquely appropriate’ and ‘the natural gathering place’ for such communications,” the board wrote, “and the use of email as a common form of workplace communication has expanded dramatically in recent years.”

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International Business Machines Corp. has named Michelle Browdy as new general counsel, succeeding Bob Weber, who is retiring after nine years.

Browdy currently is assistant general counsel as well as secretary to the IBM board. Her title will become senior vice president, legal and regulatory affairs and general counsel as of Jan. 1, reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

Browdy, 50, holds degrees from Harvard, Yale and Princeton and was a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP before joining IBM in 2006 as the head of litigation, reports.

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Guardians of Peace, the hacking group responsible for obtaining and then leaking thousands of pieces of confidential Sony information, has released the email of Sony Pictures General Counsel Leah Weil.

The nature of the majority of the documents is highly sensitive, according to a report on Gizmodo.com.

An email exchange between Weil and the president of Columbia Pictures’ business affairs carried the subject line “email purge.” The executives discussed the need for Sony to take a more cautious approach to email retention policies and whether they should move to a more secure system.

The emails also disclosed squabbles with writer-producer Aaron Sorkin, net neutrality confusion, and a host of conflicts within the company itself.

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EDRM, the leading standards organization for the e-discovery market, has released an updated Statistical Sampling Applied to Electronic Discovery. The release, published on the EDRM website, is open for public comment. At the conclusion of the public comment period on January 9, 2015, input will be reviewed and considered for incorporation before the updated materials are finalized.

Inn a release, EDRM says the updated materials provide guidance regarding the use of statistical sampling in e-discovery. Much of the information is definitional and conceptual and intended for a broad audience. Other materials (including an accompanying spreadsheet) provide additional information, particularly technical information, for e-discovery practitioners who are responsible for developing further expertise in this area.

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An elite cadre of lawyers has emerged as first among equals, giving their clients a disproportionate chance to influence the law of the land because their appeals are more likely to be accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court than others, reports Reuters.

A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.

“The lawyers are the most influential members of one of the most powerful specialties in America: the business of practicing before the Supreme Court.” the Reuters report says. “None of these lawyers is a household name. But many are familiar to the nine justices. That’s because about half worked for justices past or present, and some socialize with them.”

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Verizon Communications Inc. has announced that Craig Silliman, senior vice president, public policy, has been named executive vice president – public policy and general counsel.

His appointment will be effective Jan. 1, 2015.

He will succeed Randal S. Milch, who has been appointed to a new position as strategic policy adviser to Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and CEO. Milch will oversee strategic policy initiatives.

In his new role, Silliman will also report to McAdam and lead the company’s public policy, legal, regulatory, government affairs and security groups.

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Brinker International, Inc. announced Dec. 8 that Scarlett May has been named Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of the company, effective Dec. 15, 2014.

May is a restaurant industry veteran with an extensive background in the casual dining space, the company said in a news release. She most recently served as Senior Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary for Ruby Tuesday, Inc., which owns or franchises 749 Ruby Tuesday brand restaurants and 27 Lime Fresh brand restaurants.

Brinker International, Inc. is one of the world’s leading casual dining restaurant companies. Founded in 1975 and based in Dallas, as of Sept. 24, 2014, Brinker owned, operated or franchised 1,622 restaurants under the names Chili’s Grill & Bar (1,574 restaurants) and Maggiano’s Little Italy (48 restaurants).

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that most international bribes are paid by large corporations, usually with the knowledge of senior-level executives, reports Bloomberg BNA.

The OECD’s Foreign Bribery Report, released Dec. 2, studied 427 transnational bribery cases that occurred between February 1999 and June 2014. In 41 percent of the cases, management-level employees paid or authorized the bribes, while chief executive officers were involved in 12 percent of the cases, according to the report.

Bloomberg BNA says the report also found that three-quarters of the cases involved intermediaries. In 41 percent of the cases, the intermediaries were agents, distributors or brokers. In another 35 percent of the cases, the intermediaries were corporate vehicles, such as subsidiaries or companies established under the beneficial ownership of the foreign official being bribed.

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Out of public view, corporate representatives and attorneys general are coordinating legal strategy and other efforts to fight federal regulations, according to a review of thousands of emails and court documents and dozens of interviews, reports The New York Times.

Attorneys general in at least a dozen states are working with energy companies and other corporate interests, which in turn are providing them with record amounts of money for their political campaigns, including at least $16 million this year, according to the report in the Times.

They share a common philosophy about the reach of the federal government, but the companies also have billions of dollars at stake. And the collaboration is likely to grow.

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Many large retailers remain woefully unprepared to defend against a cyber attack, according to security experts quoted in a report in The San Jose Mercury News.

Cyber thieves are smarter and more efficient at breaking into retailers’ networks and stealing consumer data, and some credit card companies are ratcheting down fraud protection to speed transactions during the shopping rush. That sets up the holidays to potentially be a whammy of a payday for criminal groups — and puts consumers at greater risk as they enter the biggest shopping season of the year.

The report says consumers can expect to pay — as retailers face mounting fines from financial regulators for data breaches, and must invest in pricey new security systems, some experts expect the costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

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Cisco Systems filed a suit on Dec. 5 against Arista Networks, a networking switch company and fast-moving competitor, accusing it of copying large amounts of Cisco’s work, reports The New York Times.

In the suit, the plaintiff claimed Arista violated 14 Cisco patents, some of which were based on work by Andreas Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, Arista’s founders, when they were at Cisco. The two men, well-respected engineers, sold a company, Granite Systems, to Cisco in 1996.

The case, filed in the Federal District Court in Northern California, will probably go on for at least months, according to The Times‘ report. Cisco’s stated goal is to force Arista to withdraw its crucial products from the market, along with seeking damages.

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