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Good morning. Lawyers for Fox News and Dominion Voting are set to face off today over key legal questions as the voting technology company pursues a $1.6 billion defamation case against the media giant. Plus, New York City is bracing for a possible indictment of Donald Trump; JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank must face legal claims over their ties to Jeffrey Epstein; and some law schools are using a text messaging system to help monitor students’ mental health. We’re buckled in for a big week — let’s go.
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Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis today is set to take up key legal questions in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox Corp and Fox News over airing debunked vote-rigging claims, our colleague Jack Queen reports. A trial is scheduled for April 17, but both sides are seeking to convince the court to rule in their favor without the need for a trial.
Dominion’s legal team, including lawyers from Clare Locke and Susman Godfrey, will urge Davis to find Fox liable for defamation over airing debunked vote-rigging claims, while Fox lawyers at DLA Piper and other firms counter that the network’s 2020 election coverage was constitutionally protected speech. The case is one of the most closely watched defamation disputes involving a major U.S. media organization in years, Queen writes.
A filing by Dominion in the case last month was replete with references to emails and statements in which Fox Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other top Fox executives say the claims made about Dominion on-air were false. If Davis finds Fox liable for defamation at this stage of the litigation, the trial would concern only how much it must pay Dominion in damages. Fox has said Dominion’s $1.6 billion damages claim is disproportionate to the company’s actual value.
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- The Biden administration’s latest U.S. court nominees include Darrel Papillion, a former president of the Louisiana State Bar Association and trial lawyer in Baton Rouge, picked to serve on the Eastern District of Louisiana; Jeremy Daniel, a federal prosecutor in Chicago, nominated to be a judge in the Northern District of Illinois; and Brendan Abell Hurson and Matthew Maddox, two federal magistrate judges in Maryland, now up for life-tenured positions as district court judges. (Reuters)
- Some law schools are experimenting with a new tactic to better identify struggling students and get them help. At least five U.S. law schools have adopted a service first developed for medical schools, called Early Alert, that sends one text message a week to students asking them to rate how they feel about a specific topic. (Reuters)
- Google’s lawyers at Freshfields are pushing back against the DOJ’s claims for sanctions in the government’s antitrust litigation in D.C. federal court over search practices. Google denied claims it intentionally destroyed any evidence, and said it had turned over millions of documents already. (Reuters)
- Boston-founded law firm Mintz Levin opened its first international office, in Toronto, bringing on a group of five attorneys from rival firms. The new arrivals include three former practice leaders at Toronto-founded Torys. (Reuters)
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That’s how many hours plaintiffs’ lawyers suing Meta’s Facebook in an antitrust case will have to depose CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to a new court filing in the litigation in California federal court. Meta’s legal team at WilmerHale, including partner Sonal Mehta, said Zuckerberg is set to be deposed with three other current or former executives. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, representing consumer and advertiser claims, sought more than three hours for the depositions. Zuckerberg’s deposition has not been scheduled, the filing said, and Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer, is set to sit for questioning on May 2. Meta has denied the lawsuit’s allegations tied to the company’s data collection and use practices. For Zuckerberg, the deposition would mark a return to the hot seat.
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Remember the provocative U.S. Chamber report last month on mass arbitration, which called for arbitration providers to allow bellwether proceedings to curb purported abuses by plaintiffs lawyers using the leverage of fat arbitration fees? An arbitration startup called New Era ADR does just that, offering companies a process to arbitrate the merits of bellwether consumer claims. But a new brief by customers of Ticketmaster and Live Nation contends that New Era’s rules are so biased in favor of defendants that they are unconscionable. Alison Frankel explains why Ticketmaster consumers say they shouldn’t be forced into an arbitration process that, among other alleged problems, allows for only 10-page complaints and five-page briefs.
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“Californians have the constitutional right to acquire and use state-of-the-art handguns to protect themselves.“
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- In Boston federal court, U.S. District Judge William Young will hold an initial hearing in the DOJ’s lawsuit seeking to halt JetBlue’s planned $3.8 billion acquisition of ultra-low cost carrier Spirit Airlines. Responding to the lawsuit when it was filed, JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes said “the DOJ has got it wrong on the law here.” Shearman & Sterling’s Jessica Delbaum is lead counsel to JetBlue. For Spirit, Andrew Finch of Paul Weiss, a former Trump-era DOJ antitrust leader, is primary counsel. The DOJ is represented by Edward Duffy, who joined the department’s antitrust team last year from Reed Smith.
- The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global’s bid to halt lawsuits the company contends belong in private arbitration, including one by a user suing after an alleged scammer stole from his account. The justices will consider whether two proposed class actions by customers suing Coinbase can move forward while the company appeals judges’ rulings declining to force its users to arbitrate their claims. Neal Katyal of Hogan Lovells is lead appellate lawyer for Coinbase in the high court litigation. Hassan Zavareei of Tycko & Zavareei and David Harris Jr of Finkelstein & Krinsk are counsel of record to Coinbase users.
- Bill Hwang, whose Archegos Capital Management collapsed in March 2021, will seek to dismiss the DOJ’s criminal case accusing him of fraud at his once-$36 billion private investment firm. Archegos’ former chief financial officer Patrick Halligan will also seek the dismissal of criminal charges against him. Oral arguments are scheduled before U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan federal court. Hwang and Halligan have pleaded not guilty.
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- A group of major book publishers and the Internet Archive sparred before a New York federal judge in a potential landmark copyright battle over the Archive’s lending of digitally scanned books. U.S. District Judge John Koeltl had pointed questions for the Archive during oral arguments about whether copyright law’s fair use doctrine allows it to lend the scanned books without the publishers’ permission. Publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House sued the Archive in 2020 over its free lending of scanned copies of thousands of their print books. (Reuters)
- Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX sued the liquidators overseeing the wind-down of its Bahamian affiliate FTX Digital Markets, accusing them of wrongly claiming ownership of the exchange’s assets. FTX Trading asked a U.S. bankruptcy judge in Delaware to rule that FTX Digital Markets had no ownership interest in FTX.com’s cryptocurrency, intellectual property, and customer relationships. (Reuters)
- U.S. Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch appeared skeptical of the federal government’s argument that it has no obligation to develop a plan to provide the Navajo Nation with an adequate water supply. The high court’s nine justices heard oral arguments in two related appeals raised by the U.S. government and a coalition of Western states to a lower court’s decision that revived a long-running dispute brought by the Navajo Nation against the U.S. (Reuters)
- A construction trade group in a lawsuit claimed a U.S. labor board’s top prosecutor violated employers’ constitutional rights by threatening legal action against businesses that require workers to attend meetings discouraging unionizing. Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan said a 2022 memo by NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo improperly discourages employers from exercising their free speech rights. (Reuters)
- Four associates of the far-right Oath Keepers group were found guilty in D.C. federal court for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, but the Washington jury remained deadlocked on some serious charges for two other defendants who did not enter the building during the chaos. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta instructed the jury to go back and continue to deliberate on the remaining counts. (Reuters)
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- Kirkland hired Rhys Davies as a partner in its ESG and impact practice in London. Davies most recently led DLA Piper’s international sustainability and ESG group. (Reuters)
- Gordon Rees added Chicago-based partner Gretchen Harris Sperry as a co-chair of the firm’s appellate practice. She arrives from Hinshaw & Culbertson. (Gordon Rees)
- Morgan Lewis brought on litigator Ann Batlle as a partner to its D.C.-based nonprofits team. Batlle was previously deputy general counsel at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. (Morgan Lewis)
- Greenspoon Marder hired partner Talat Ansari to its corporate and litigation practice groups in New York. Ansari was most recently at Seyfarth Shaw. (Greenspoon Marder)
- Milbank’s former manager of diversity, equity and inclusion Bobby Codjoe has joined rival New York firm Morrrison Cohen as DEI director. (Morrison Cohen)
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Startups should strive to obtain intellectual property protection early, since entrepreneurial investors look at such measures as a marker of ambition, innovation and initiative, write Luke MacDonald and Daniel Tucker of Finnegan Henderson. Obtaining IP protection at low cost for a young company needn’t be as elusive as it once was. Here are a few tips.
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