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The Federal Circuit heard a rare full-court argument in a dispute between General Motors and auto-parts maker LKQ that could upend design-patent law, our colleague Blake Brittain reports.
Ten of the court’s judges grappled with whether to invalidate a GM patent covering a vehicle fender, questioning the current test for design-patent validity while struggling with how to change it. “We don’t want to replace one potentially bad test with a different potentially bad test,” Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore said during the argument.
The U.S. government also participated in the argument, telling the judges that they should adopt a more “holistic” test for determining when a design patent is obvious and invalid.
Circuit Judge Pauline Newman, who was suspended from the Federal Circuit bench in September amid an internal investigation into her fitness to serve, attended the argument as an observer. “I have some ideas, but no one wanted to hear them,” the prominent 96-year-old patent jurist told reporters after the hearing.
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- Law schools must now adopt free speech policies in order to maintain their accreditation by the American Bar Association, following a key vote by the organization. The ABA’s policymaking body also adopted a resolution opposing laws or policies that “restrict the teaching and inclusion of studies on the experiences, roles, and contributions of any individual or group” on the basis of their race, gender identity, sexual orientation or religion, among other identifiers.
- A London court cleared a former Clifford Chance lawyer of insider dealing over allegations he used confidential information to buy shares in listed companies. Suhail Zina, who was standing trial alongside his brother, a former Goldman Sachs analyst, had pleaded not guilty and was acquitted of all counts. His brother’s trial continues.
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That is the number of settlements the DOJ has now reached in the Biden administration’s Combating Redlining Initiative since 2021. In the most recent agreement, First National Bank of Pennsylvania reached a $13.5 million settlement with the DOJ and North Carolina to resolve charges it engaged in lending discrimination known as redlining in the Charlotte and Winston-Salem markets. A DOJ lawyer said the settlement “should send a strong message.”
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“If there was a one-in-a-billion chance that someone could buy a contaminated product, does every person who ever bought that product have standing to sue?“
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— 7th Circuit Judge Ilana Rovner, who was among the skeptical judges on an appellate panel hearing arguments as a group of parents sought to revive their claims that they overpaid for Abbott Laboratories’ baby formula from a manufacturing plant that was later closed over unsanitary conditions. The parents had said they would not have bought, or would have paid less, for Similac and other Abbott brands if they had known of the safety risks that led to the plant shutdown and a subsequent recall, but those claims were dismissed by the district court.
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- Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is expected to take the stand in a London trial over the intellectual property rights to the bitcoin blockchain. A Jack Dorsey-backed group, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, is asking London’s High Court to rule that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the author of a 2008 white paper that is the foundational text of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Wright says he is Satoshi, who has never been identified, and has taken legal action against cryptocurrency developers and exchanges.
- A U.S. judicial panel will hold a public hearing on a proposed new rule that would govern how judges organize the initial stages of federal mass tort cases and encourage parties to exchange information about their claims and defenses early in the process. The federal judiciary’s Advisory Committee on Civil Rules in March voted in favor of publishing a draft rule for public comment that would apply to federal multidistrict litigations across the country.
- Parents who said their child’s severe autism was caused by heavy metals in baby food manufactured by Hain Celestial and sold at Whole Foods will urge the 5th Circuit to revive their lawsuit against the companies after a judge determined they hadn’t drawn a connection between the food and his diagnosis.
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Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
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- A South Carolina woman, along with Planned Parenthood, filed a lawsuit asking a court to rule that the state’s abortion ban applies after about nine weeks of pregnancy, not six weeks, saying that its language based on fetal “heartbeat” is ambiguous. Plaintiff Taylor Shelton said in her lawsuit that without clarity from the court, providers in the state have interpreted the ban to take effect around six weeks.
- Warner Bros Discovery won the dismissal of a proposed class action led by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, claiming it concealed negative financial information prior to the April 2022 merger of AT&T’s WarnerMedia and Discovery. U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan said the offering documents accurately explained how the company calculated streaming numbers and that executives were not required to disclose other information.
- More than 2,000 military family members and residents living near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu filed a new mass lawsuit against the U.S. government over a 2021 fuel spill at the base that sent 19,000 gallons of jet fuel into the water supply. The lawsuit is at least the sixth to come out of the spill, which led to the shutdown of the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility at the base.
- Johnson & Johnson was hit with a proposed class action accusing the company’s employee health plans of failing to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, which cost workers millions of dollars in overpayments for generic drugs. The lawsuit filed in New Jersey federal court accuses Johnson & Johnson of breaching its duty under the ERISA to prudently manage employee benefit plans.
- Real estate brokerage units of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway asked the U.S. Supreme Court to unwind a consumer class action that culminated in a $1.8 billion trial verdict against them and other real estate defendants last year. In its filing, HomeServices said it never should have faced a trial, arguing that home sellers had agreed to arbitrate disputes out of court.
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- Paul Weiss added Kimberly Branscome as a partner in its litigation department, based in Los Angeles. Branscome previously co-led the product liability and mass torts practice at Dechert, where she was managing partner of its L.A. office. (Reuters)
- Former Biden White House Counsel Stuart Delery returned to Gibson Dunn’s Washington, D.C., office. Delery will be a partner and co-chair of the firm’s crisis management and administrative law and regulatory practice groups. (Reuters)
- Paul Hastings hired New York-based partner Colin Diamond from White & Case as co-chair of the firm’s global capital markets practice. (Reuters)
- Bracewell brought on Judge Roslynn Mauskopf, who most recently was director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. She joined the firm’s New York office as a partner in the government enforcement and investigations practice. (Bracewell)
- Lowenstein Sandler picked up Amy Mushahwar as a D.C.-based partner and chair of its data, privacy and cybersecurity practice. She arrives from Alston & Bird. (Lowenstein)
- BakerHostetler added Jennifer“Jenna”Solari in Atlanta as a partner in its litigation practice and white-collar, investigations and securities enforcement and litigation team. She was most recently a federal prosecutor in Georgia. (BakerHostetler)
- Proskauer hired private funds partner James Oussedik in London to co-lead its global credit funds and sovereign wealth funds initiatives in Europe. He most recently was at Sidley Austin. (Proskauer)
- Blank Rome hired Audrey Momanaee as a commercial litigation partner. Momanaee was previously with Balch & Bingham. (Blank Rome)
- DLA Piper added leveraged finance partners Alan Rockwell and Heather Waters Borthwick in New York. They were at Shearman & Sterling. (DLA Piper)
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Although ChatGPT was not designed solely for the task of summarization, its generative AI capabilities have made it a useful tool for prompting summaries of text and concepts. This summarization capability is a focal point in the recent suit Silverman v. OpenAI, Inc., in which plaintiffs, all authors of books, are suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI. This case is among several recent lawsuits that have drawn intense interest because the claims test the bounds of copyright law as it relates to the use of copyrighted works to train a machine learning model, write Sasha Rosenthal-Larrea, Daniel Barabander and Lucille Dai-He of Cravath.
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