In the spirit of entertaining legal stories like the one below that
Chris recently shared with our Alerding Castor Hewitt, LLP
audience, I thought I would share a story I ran across yesterday
about a trademark dispute. Also,
because Chris is a connoisseur of fine comfort food, I’m sure that
he will enjoy it.
A restaurant in Bellevue, Washington, John Howie Steak, has come up
with a caloric-intensive burger that starts with grilling a
12-ounce ground chuck patty and then tops it with Kurobuta...
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Ok, I'll admit it. I was in a rut. Although I found
numerous interesting tidbits through-out cyberspace, I could not
find anything that piqued my interest enough to put aside the
billable hours of a technology legal counsel for a few moments to
blog about it. But, lo and behold, a college student with a
sense of panache, an aspiration for humor, decent journaling
skills, and access to PowerPoint and the Internet has become my
muse.
For those of you that don't know, 2010 Duke graduate...
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Your
friendly Indianapolis attorney at Alerding Castor Hewitt, LLP with
a brief overview (not an in-depth analysis of all of the legal
issues) of some recent Seventh Circuit decisions involving internet
litigation, trademark disputes, and anti-cybersquatting that could
affect technology, software, and business clients maintaining
websites and engaging in cyber-marketing.
Last Friday, October 1, 2010, the Seventh Circuit upheld the
dismissal of a suit for lack of personal jurisdiction...
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I guest lectured at Purdue’s Entrepreneurship Capstone course again
last week. I love it – for an hour I talked about my
experience in entreprenuerial law, business law and funding law to
Seniors in Purdue's entreprenuership concentration program on
issues consider when structuring a new company. Honestly, I
thought I had them bored out of their minds (yes, there was that
one Greek letter wearing frat guy who was asleep about 10 rows
back), but I was impressed when we got to the Q&A time...
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Here is one of those convergence points where business law and
privacy law intersect and effectuate additional administrative
duties on the business holder. In a rather interesting
bulletin, the Connecticut Department of Insurance issued a
directive on August 18, 2010, requiring "that all licensees and
registrants of the Department notify the Department of any
information security incident which affects any Connecticut
residents as soon as the incident is identified, but no later than
five (5)...
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Your friendly Indianapolis attorney at Alerding Castor Hewitt, LLP
here, this time with a probate law update. The Court of Appeals of
Indiana decided an issue of first impression yesterday in an
Indiana probate litigation matter. The case was Avery v.
Avery, --- N.E.2d ---, cause no. 49A05-1004-PL-320 (Ind. Ct.
App. Sept. 7, 2010). In short, the Court concluded that an
answer is required in a will contest. A
copy of that published opinion may be found here.
The facts relevant to the issue on...
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Your friendly Indianapolis litigation associate at Alerding Castor
Hewitt LLP here with another blog post.
About a month ago, in an aspirational piece, I piggybacked off of a
post by Michael P. Alerding at Alerding & Co. on the importance
of words and how they should mean something. You can read my prior post here and the one by ACH’s Dave Castor
re-posting Mr. Alderding’s original post here.
Today’s post is to tell you about a recent victory that one of our
SaaS law clients achieved in a...
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Today I am preparing for a guest lecture at Purdue University's
Discovery Park this week on developing business plans and my
experience as an entrepreneur. I read a lot of business plans
- about 100 per year, and I also help draft business plans and pro
formas for business law clients and my own companies.
Here are some general guidelines to consider when developing a
business plan:
1.
Write to the intended
audience. Is the reader the leadership team or
potential investors? If to...
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Your friendly neighborhood technology legal counsel here: I
recently saw an article over at PC World that security firm AVG
recently did a study of the safest countries in which to surf the
Internet. Seven of the top ten are in Africa, with Sierra
Leone rated the safest. The study is based on incidence of
attack by a compiled list of virus and malware attacks. The
study found that Sierra Leone's average incident rate was one
attack in every 692 surfers. Niger also fared well with 1 in
442...
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Another
post that doesn't quite fit neatly into Indiana Internet litigation
or privacy law, but that intrigues me. BusinessWeek, passing
along a Tim Greene article from NetworkWorld (found here:
www.networkworld.com/nwlookup.jsp),
is reporting that the U.S. military has issued an essay in which it
urges its expertise in defense be put to use in protecting civilian
networked infrastructure, such as power grids, financial
institutions, etc. The essay from Foreign Affairs sets out
the concept...
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Alerding
Castor Hewitt, LLP is a law firm that does a
substantial amount of legal work with clients in SaaS law and as
technology legal counsel. So much so that we were asked to
contribute to
Corporate Blogging for Dummies, a
best practices book that our friends Douglas Karr and Chantelle
Flannery were approached to write.
As a law firm that utilizes blogging to reach our current and
potential clients, the Alerding Castor Hewitt, LLP website was
featured as an example within these pages....
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I don't often blanket repost other blogs that I see, however, in
this instance, I think it is appropriate. Venkat, writing for
Professor Goldman's blog, writes an excellent analysis of the
recent ruling in the
In re: Easysaver Rewards Litigation(S.D. Cal. August 13, 2010). This is a very interesting case
in that it covers several different, more traditional causes of
action and analysis. I'm interested to see what ramification
this case is going to have on SaaS law and privacy
litigation....
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Back in October, 2009, I posted about the new endorsement /
testimonial rules set out by the Federal Trad Commission (
blog.alerdingcastor.com/blog/alerding-castor/0/0/ftc-makes-changes-to-blog-law).
There has been some development since that time, but mostly
everyone is still watching and waiting. The FTC did
threaten to pursue Ann Taylor back in April, but otherwise, it has
been relatively silent.
That is, however, until now. On August 26, 2010, the FTC
reached a settlement with Reverb...
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I was reminded today of something told to me by a friend last
year:
Good people who are smart
ask good questions
Bad people who are smart ask bad questions
Good people who are not smart ask bad questions
In business we are always looking for answers – but what we
really want are good answers. Today the issue is never
whether we have enough data (we arguably have too much), it is
whether we can properly utilize that data to make better
decisions. I see this especially in my Internet Law /...
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Your friendly Indianapolis attorney at Alerding Castor Hewitt LLP
here with a history lesson and tie in to business law. Most
of you have probably heard the term “gerrymander” and know that it
refers to a process of dividing a territory into districts in order
to give one political party an advantage over another by
concentrating the voting strength of that party in as many
districts as possible. Fewer of you
probably know the origin of the term, and I imagine that even
fewer know much about...
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I work with a national angel investor group that invites members
(investors) to join on two general rules:
1. You cannot be a jerk;
2. You have to invest in companies.
The President of this organization has removed a couple of members
this year because they received rule #1 complaints from other
members.
In my funding law practice I represent and/or work with several
private equity firms, angel investor groups and private equity
funds. Most funds and angel investor groups run into this
jerk...
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I probably hate the word "policy" as much as any word in the
English language, but I think company policies can be helpful - in
both giving employees information on what is available to them and
what conduct is expected of them.
In the last couple of years I have noticed a rise of social media
policies in company employee handbooks. Most larger companies
have Internet use policies stating that employees may not use
company time or computers for personal Internet usage. The
main goal here is to...
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I recently caught a glimpse of the logo for one of our SaaS Law
clients, ExactTarget, while flipping
through the television channels. It was
an episode of TLC’s “American Chopper” that first aired last
Thursday for a bike built for Window World. The bike was unveiled during the ceremonies
surrounding the Indianapolis 500.
ExactTarget’s logo appeared briefly on the side of the pavilion and
again on one of the race cars.
As cheesy as it might sound, I was excited to see one of our
client’s...
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The ACH litigation team had its first ever (as far as I'm aware)
litigation retreat this weekend, and as I reminisce on our time, I
am struck by the realization that to be a successful business, you
have to allow your team to envision and strive for excellence with
you. This weekend we had some great discussion and
"vision-casting" on the areas of privacy litigation, Indiana
probate litigation, business law, Internet litigation, banking law,
SaaS litigation, and several other areas where we are...
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Something that women and/or minority
business owners may want to consider is registration with the
Indiana Department of Administration Minority and Women's Business
Enterprises Division to become certified as a minority-owned or
woman-owned business.
Established in order to give such businesses an equal opportunity
to participate in the state purchasing process, the criteria
considered for such certification include that the minority/woman
member possess:
- ownership of the business (at least...
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