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 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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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 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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I attended an angel investor group meeting today. This was an
interesting group - only 10 or so people, each of very high net
worth, looking for large investment opportunities. They
remind me more of a private equity firm with the types of deals
they are considering, but they invest individually - maintaining
the typical angel investor dynamic.
One investor is a recently retired C-level executive of a fortune
100 company. He told me about his approach to investments -
questions he works...
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FIRM JOINS INNOVATION SUMMIT AS SPONSOR
For the second year in a row, the
firm committed to this year’s Innovation Summit as the Plenary
Panel Sponsor.
This annual event brings together entrepreneurs,
executives and policymakers for learning, dialogue and debate on
the central challenge of today’s economy – turning today’s ideas
into tomorrow’s business breakthroughs. The Summit includes keynote
speakers, breakout sessions on a variety of innovation related
topics, and dozens of trade and...
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Gather 'round kids, this one is interesting. The decision
actually came out in May, 2010, and I regret that I haven't had a
chance to blog on it until now, but it is still a very interesting
order that should have implications to privacy litigation, and
litigation in general. In EEOC v. Simply Storage Management,
LLC, Docket No. 09-CV-01223, the Southern District of Indiana was
faced with the issue of discovery of social networking profiles of
two individuals that claimed sexual harrassment by...
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This
morning I attended the
Techpoint event: What it Takes
to Lead a Successful Entrepreneurial Venture Today and was
reminded of some fundamental leadership qualities that I see in
many of the successful business owners we work with as a business,
entrepreneurial and information technology law firm.
Speaking today were Daniel DeHayes, a Professor Emeritus of
Business Administration with the Indiana University Kelley School
of Business and Delphia Croft, the Managing Principal of...
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It’s not often that we at Alerding Castor Hewitt, LLP run into
issues regarding the payment of commissions for our business law,
SaaS law, and Indiana technology clients. When the subject does arise, however, it usually
occurs when an employee separates from employment and makes a wage
claim for unpaid commissions. The
debate about whether the commissions are wages centers on whether
the employee was entitled to the commission at the time of sale OR
when the client pays for the product,...
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Your friendly Indianapolis attorney and Partner In Success at
Alerding Castor Hewitt, LLP here with another post, this time for
both business entities and lawyers who find themselves in the
trenches of business law, SaaS law, internet laws, and privacy
litigation and probate litigation.
Partner and fellow blogger Dave Castor sort of beat me to the bunch
by pointing out a great blog post by Michael P. Alerding (ACH’s
Mike Alerding’s father) at Alerding & Co., LLC, which Dave
re-posted below. I...
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