Joint defense agreements are an increasingly common part of big patent litigaitons, in the Northern District and across the country. Having been involved in numerous joint defense groups, my colleague Thomas Paternak and I wrote an article that was published in the most recent edition of the ABA’s Litigation magazine about best practices for joint defense groups and dealing with joint defense agreements — click here to for a pdf of the article, with permission from the ABA of course.
Probably the most important tip is one I have discussed before — communication, including live meeetings, is critical to building and maintaining relationships among the joint defense group:
The number of members of the [joint defense group] will have some bearing on how it is organized and managed, but regardless, communication is the key. Weekly, short conference calls once the case is running hot are important, however painful that is, to keep everyone looped in. For important strategy decisions, live meetings are going to be necessary. At the same time, try to put as few communications between co-defendants in writing as possible. Discovery of those communications can and does happen, despite all best legal efforts to prevent it, and you will be particularly embarrassed if you disparage opposing counsel or the judge in venting in an e-mail to your codefendant and that e-mail ends up being produced.
Click here for my previous discussion of the importance of live meetings for building relationships during litigations and click here for Victoria Pynchon’s IP ADR blog post that sparked my comments.

Continue Reading Making Joint Defense Agreements Work

Blawg Review #175 is up at Jamie Spencer’s Austin DWI Lawyer (another LexBlog site) — click here to read the Review. Fitting with Ed.’s sense of humor, a DWI lawyer was chosen to host the Labor Day Review, instead of a more traditional pick, like a labor lawyer. Of course, there are lots of interesting DWI posts, and a few good IP links. Spencer links to Victoria Pynchon’s post at the IP ADR Blog about the arrest of a blogger who posted new Guns N’ Roses tracks before the group released its new album — click here to read it. In a “teeny tiny” act of civil disobedience, Pynchon posted the entire text of the LA Times story on the arrest. While I will admit to one or two acts of civil disobedience in my day, today you are just getting a link to the Chicago Tribune’s story by Michelle Quinn and Swati Pandey on the arrest and the increasing use of criminal copyright infringement prosecutions — click here.
September’s Carnival of Trust is up at Compensation Force — click here for the Carnival. There are no specific legal or IP posts this month, but lots of great stuff on building and maintaining relationships with trust.

Continue Reading Blawg Review & the September Carnival of Trust

Last week’s Olympic edition Blawg Review focused on the medals. Building on that, this week I discuss the elements of a world record swim. If you were watching last week, instead of blogging, you saw 20 of them in the Olympic pool; seven by Mr. Phelps.
Practice
Nothing is more critical than preparation. A big part of preparation is tightening your stroke and cutting out unnecessary motion. Reese Morrison, at the Law Department Management blog, discusses blunt suggestions for trimming legal bills.
Endless hours in the pool alone are not enough, you need a good coach. Business development coach Cordell Parvin provides an excellent three part series at his Law Consulting Blog – one, two, and three – on persistence, an important element of any Olympic training program. In an Olympic caliber display of persistence, Drug & Device Law had an exhaustive post discussing and classifying each medical device preemption case since the landmark Supreme Court decision in Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., 128 S. Ct. 999 (2008).
You also need a support network to help you get through all of the pool time. Bruce Allen, at Marketing Catalyst, teaches us how to avoid the cocktail conversation you cannot escape from at a networking event. At Copyblogger, John Morrow explains that content is no longer king in the blogosphere, you need friends. And he teaches you how to get them. At BlawgIT, Brett Trout – who is a fighter, not a swimmer – has an interesting post about how to work together as a community to thwart webjackings (the hijacking of a website). And Mediation Channel’s Diane Levin discusses the social side of blogging, and reading blogs.
Of course, if you do not have time to practice you will never set the record. So, you need a job, or at least some cash. On that note, Harmful Error posts the great news that loan forgiveness programs were expanded this week for legal aid lawyers, state prosecutors and public defenders.
The Suit
The clothes make the man (or the woman). This year the go-to duds were Speedo’s LZR suits. Patent Librarian Michael White tells us that, no surprise, Speedo patented the LZR. IPKat expands on swimming patents, providing a broader view of Olympics-related patents.
Genes
As a guy who swam for a lot of years and practiced hard throughout, I can tell you not everyone has what it takes to set world records. The closest I came was getting beat by an Olympian and world record holder. Of course, you might be less impressed by my loss if you knew that at the time his Olympic medals were four or five decades old, and I was 19. At Idealawg, Stephanie West Allen discusses the traits that make entrepreneurs entrepreneurial.
Mental Focus
One of the big stories on Phelps this week was how he thinks of nothing but not losing during a race. At Litigation & Trial, Maxwell Kennerly tells us that you have to know when you are sweating the details more than your client would want by over emphasizing proof-reading. Of course, even Kennerly agrees that some details matter.
Knowing the Rules
You have to know the rules. Turn wrong or break the rules for your stroke and beating a record by ten seconds will not matter. At the Legal Juice, John Mesirow reports that kids at the Lake County Florida library are allowed to rent R-rated movies because they believe it is an unconstitutional delegation of authority for the Motion Picture Association of America’s guidelines for determining obscenity. I am sure kids from all over that area are flocking to the Lake County library because the rules are on their side, at least for now.
Filewrapper reports on a Federal Circuit decision holding that copyright infringement, and not just breach of contract, when the terms of an open source license governing the copyrighted material are breached. For more on this major decision in the IP world, check out: BLT; Law Pundit; and Patently-O.
Seattle Trademark Lawyer Mike Graham shows the consequences of not following the rules using two Western District of Washington opinions.
Ethan Lieb, guest blogging at Freakonomics, argues that we need to change the rules requiring unanimous juries. And the WSJ Law Blog discusses a judge and a juror who clashed over jury nullification.
The Start
A bad start is hard to recover from, especially when you are chasing the fastest time ever. Evan Schaeffer shows how to open well at trial at the Illinois Trial Practice Weblog, and he links to Trial Theatre’s opening statement quiz.
Turns
Coming off the wall in a turn is the fastest a swimmer goes during a race. So, you need good turns. IntLawGrrls discuss how to turn around the conflict between Georgia and Russia (sorry the turns section was tough).
Legal Literacy discusses Whole Foods’ turned around (or recalled) beef and looks behind the scenes at how it happened and Whole Foods’ impressively quick response.
The Finish
Do you do an extra stroke or do you glide in hard? Always a tough question, but the .01 seconds the decision costs you can mean the race and the record.
At his E.D. Texas Weblog, Michael Smith reports that while the E.D. Texas started out as a rocket docket, particularly for patents, it has now slowed down and let many other districts catch it with a time to trial of 24 – 30 months.
The Law and Magic Blog reminds us that we cannot always win, and that trying to rig the system to guarantee wins – he is talking about the stock market, but it holds true for the pool – is dangerous work.
At the IP ADR Blog, Victoria Pynchon praises several Perkins Coie attorneys who went the distance for their pro bono clients at Gitmo and earned the clients’ respect for providing them an able defense.
** Images provided via a Creative Commons license by A. Dawson or Andre from Flicker. **
Next week’s Blawg Review will be at fellow LexBlog site, the Texas Appellate Law Blog.
Blawg Review has information about next week’s host, and instructions on how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.

Continue Reading Blawg Review #173

For my rookie Blawg Review, I kept my head down, worked hard and hoped to meet the Review’s high standards set by the reviewers before me. Victoria Pynchon at the IP ADR Blog, took a different route. She guaranteed victory, promising “one of the best [Blawg Review]’s ever.” And she was right. She used a risque theme and a massive number of links to deliver an excellent review — click here to read it. My only complaint, I cannot possibly get through all of her linked posts.
I am hosting the Blawg Review in two weeks, and Pynchon has set the bar high. Make sure to be here in two weeks to watch me clear it.

Continue Reading Blawg Review #171 — Setting, Then Meeting Expectations

Blawg Review # 170 is up (actually it went up yesterday,* a day early) at Simple Justice, a New York blog with a criminal defense focus — click here for the Review. This week’s theme is the due process and equal protection rights granted by the Fourteenth Amendment. As the son of a criminal defense attorney, I have a soft spot for the due process clause. And Simple Justice does not disappoint, providing a varied look at last week’s legal blog posts.
Blawg Review returns here in three weeks, after visiting the IP ADR Blog and the Ohio Employer’s Law blog over the next two weeks.
* Who says Blawg Review does not get any link love? Actually, Ed. does, but I cannot imagine it is true.

Continue Reading Blawg Review #170 — Equal Protection & Due Process

Victoria Pynchon posted an article she wrote (not sure where it was published) at her IP ADR Blog — click here for the post and the article. Pynchon argued that the common practice of communicating with opposing counsel largely by email, except during depositions or hearings, tends to increase animosity and conflict of a litigation. In the asocial world of email we tend to write more aggressively and we tend to read more aggression into emails we receive. Pynchon supports these theories with studies, but I suspect most litigators are aware of the email aggression problem from practice.
It is no surprise that increased aggression in a naturally aggressive proceeding has negative consequences. For example, parties that often meet for the first time at a mediation or settlement conference arrive not trusting or respecting each other, making resolution much more difficult. Pynchon suggested a somewhat radical solution to the email problem — live meetings with opposing counsel. She suggested that you routinely have live meetings with opposing counsel throughout the course of a litigation, including perhaps even doing some meetings over a meal. The face-to-face contact would generate the trust and respect needed to resolve issues that always arise during a litigation. I have always advocated live meetings with co-counsel in a multi-party litigation. Email communications (or even conference calls) tend to get out of hand and the parties tend not to pay enough attention to others’ positions. I am going to expand that practice to opposing counsel.
One other thought, that I do not know if Pynchon will agree with. Those who still avoid email and continue using letters as a main communication means are not off the hook. I started practicing when letters, not emails, were how you communicated with opposing counsel. Those letters tended to be far more aggressive than the attorneys were in a live conversation. And I suspect people tended to read extra aggression into the letters they received. I do not know if aggression is stronger in emails than letters, but the same problem exists whether you hit send, hit print or use a pen to write to opposing counsel.

Continue Reading A Call for Face-to-Face Communication in Litigation

Last week the intellectual property world obsessed over injunctions – specifically, a preliminary injunction hearing in the Eastern District of Virginia resulting in an injunction against the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office’s (“PTO”) new continuation rules. There was a lot of analysis about the injunction, including live blogging by Patent Practice Center Patent Blog and a lot of post-injunction analysis by, among others: 271 Patent Blog; FileWrapper; Patent Baristas; Patent Docs (and here); Patent Prospector; PHOSITA; Patently-O; WSJ Law Blog; and Washington State Patent Law Blog. For those of you who have no idea what a continuation is or just do not care about the particulars of the rules, I promise that I am done with patent continuations for this post. Honestly, I find the rules rather tedious myself. I prefer to focus on litigating patents, rather than the PTO’s prosecution rules. So, today we talk about injunctions:
According to TechCrunch, Patent Monkey received a permanent injunction when it was sold to the Internet Real Estate Group. But Patent Monkey’s patent search technology will see its injunction lifted when it is used on www.patents.com. Hopefully, for those like me who enjoyed it, Patent Monkey’s Infinite Monkey Theorem Blog will also see its injunction lifted.
Virtually Blind has an interesting report on Second Life’s* new Patent & Trademark Office, the SLPTO. No word on whether the SLPTO and the Second Life legal system generally will allow for any permanent injunctions. Right now it appears that the SLPTO will be heavily skewed toward copyright and trademark, which makes sense in a virtual world. And before we learn whether the SLPTO has any enforcement mechanisms, Blawg IT is offering to represent virtual clients before the SLPTO. I would get a retainer up front Brett – virtual clients can be difficult to track down when the bills are due.
The Patry Copyright Blog shows why Second Life injunctions may be necessary. Six Second Life players have sued a Queens man in the Eastern District of New York for trademark and copyright infringement based upon sales of goods in Second Life. I wonder if the trademarks and copyrights were registered with the SLPTO or the US PTO/Copyright Office. And does the E.D.N.Y. have authority to issue cyber-injunctions?
Promote the Progress provides an interesting piece on the long-term effects of last week’s injunction against the PTO on shaping patent reform.
SportsBiz explains that plaintiffs who were bilked out of millions in attorneys’ fees by their now-jailed lawyers were not irreparably harmed. A Kentucky court awarded them a 20% ownership interest in Curlin, the prize race horse and Breeder’s Cup Classic winner partially owned by the jailed lawyers.
Adams Drafting issues its own injunction against using virgules. Using what? The virgule, or the forward slash. He explains that it is frequently used to mean: 1) “per” – 50 miles/hour; 2) “or” – and/or; and 3) “and” – all parents/subsidiaries/affiliates are bound by the obligations. The problem is that the various uses create ambiguity. Adams acknowledges that he cannot find any litigation specifically about the virgule. But the best solution is to remove the virgule from your writing before you become embroiled in the first litigation over one. And when it comes to rules of writing and grammar, the best solution is to listen to Adams.
What if you do not want an injunction or just want a faster, cheaper resolution? The IP ADR blog is talking about last week’s big settlement between Vonage and Verizon. They suggest that you consider using contingent agreements to control for changing future conditions and charitable contributions. They also point out that creativity and out-of-the-box thinking are important elements for reaching settlements.
Another way to avoid an injunction is to understand how best to argue against the opposing party and their counsel. The Center for Internet & Society discusses how men and women in the United States and in other cultures communicate and suggests that understanding the nuances of how different people communicate around the globe could advance legal discourse.
Lowering the Bar reports on a Michigan man sentenced to sixty days in jail for a home invasion that ended in him throwing two large pickles at residents of the home. No word on whether he will be enjoined from pickle ownership. Okay, that is a weak tie-in, but who can resist a pickle invasion story.
Deliberations discusses one of the basic truths of trial law – you must connect with your jury about basic truths of your case. That is equally true when seeking an injunction – if the judge senses something is not right about your argument, you will not get your injunction.
The writers’ strike that is expected this week is not an injunction, but it will mean an end to new scripted television and movies. Concurring Opinions has an interesting post about a brewing legal dispute between the studios and the writers’ union, the Writers Guild of America (“WGA”). The WGA is requiring that members provide information on all unproduced projects and an update on the status of those projects, as per the labor agreement between the WGA and the studios. But the studios, based upon their individual agreements with writers, are warning writers that the studios own the scripts and the writers are barred by contract from giving the WGA any information about the projects. These conflicting contracts place the writers in quite a pickle (I could not resist), and it poses an interesting legal question as to which contract controls.
And I end with a post that is actually about an injunction. The Maryland IP Law Blog (another LexBlog creation) posted about a District of Delaware court that upheld a jury verdict of patent infringement and plans to enter a permanent injunction against Lonza, Ltd., Nutrinova Inc. and Nutrinova Nutrition Specialties & Food Ingredients GmbH prohibiting the U.S. sale and use of a fatty acid product currently marketed under the brand name Lonza DHA for use in functional foods and dietary supplements.
Thanks for reading. And for the Blog’s regular readers, I will be back to my usual Northern District of Illinois focus tomorrow.
* Second Life is an internet-based virtual world where “residents” interact through avatars. For example, the Seventh Circuit’s Judge Posner appeared in Second Life with an avatar closely resembling him to answer questions from, among others, a DC IP lawyer using an avatar of a humanized raccoon. Check out the New World Notes blog for a transcript and some screenshots.

Continue Reading Blawg Review #133