I am continuing with the countdown of my top ten most popular blog or LinkedIn posts of 2025, and we have now made it all the way to number four. For those of you new to the countdown, you can find the rules of the contest here.
The fourth most popular post of 2025
I really like a good theme. I can’t help it – it’s the trial lawyer in me. Frankly, I not only like a good theme in an opening and closing at trial, but in an oral argument on appeal or in an appeal brief. Themes help tremendously with communication, particularly in litigation.
So it won’t
A recent discussion with a colleague in the insurance industry (who shall remain nameless so as to protect the innocent) caused me to crystalize some of my inchoate thinking on how current problems in ERISA class action litigation, including too many suits, too much defense spending, too much self-protective caution on the part of plan
Continuing with my countdown of my top ten most read blog posts of 2024 – as chosen by you, the reader! – leads me today to one of my favorite topics, namely the increasing targeting of small (relatively speaking) ERISA plans by class action firms bringing suits alleging that the plans were too expensive. In
Jacklyn Wille of Bloomberg Law, who by now knows more about ERISA litigation than most ERISA litigators, has an interesting article out (you can find it here; subscription may be required), concerning court approval of a “$1.7 million class settlement benefiting participants in an Advance Auto Parts Inc. subsidiary’s retirement plan . . .
Last week, I spoke on a panel with, among others, Trucker Huss’ Joe Faucher, who discussed some aspects of Ninth Circuit ERISA jurisprudence with a mostly East Coast-centric audience. A week later, that circuit has turned out two of the more interesting and potentially significant appellate decisions in ERISA that any court has produced
You know, you live long enough and you see everything come back around again. Ties get skinny, then they get wide. Standardized testing is seen as the key to everything, then as evil incarnate, then as the key to everything again. Baseball is learning to again look at the quality of the player on the
Riddle me this, Riddler: what does the design of a center entrance colonial house have to do with complex computer software?
A lot, it turns out, if you are interested in the borders that should attach to IP rights so as to best balance the need to encourage the creation of new products against
I am quoted extensively in this week’s Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly in the article “Businesses increasingly assert patents for strategic reasons,” which discusses companies bringing patent infringement claims against their competitors as a business tactic, and whether recent Supreme Court decisions making it theoretically easier to obtain an award of attorney’s fees will reduce the
In the years leading up to the Wall Street collapse of 2008, I spent a fair amount of my time defending smaller tech and similar companies against intellectual property suits, including patent suits and preliminary injunction proceedings, often involving infringement claims that were, in my book, specious at best. Interestingly to me at the time