Media & Entertainment

Expert Analysis

• Copyright Law Issues Plague Sherlock Holmes Suit

  

  The Arthur Conan Doyle estate's recent lawsuit in a New Mexico federal court against Netflix over a Sherlock Holmes movie faces significant challenges to its copyright infringement argument, including a Seventh Circuit ruling that Sherlock Holmes characters who appeared in public domain and copyright-protected stories can exist in different forms, says Stephen Lee at Benesch Friedlander.

• Opinion

  ADA Protects Lawyers With Disabilities, But We Must Do More

  

  As an attorney with cerebral palsy, Danielle Liebl at Reed Smith says that while the 30-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act has protected her against discrimination, the legal industry must do more to accommodate lawyers with disabilities and make them more comfortable in self-identifying.

• Perspectives

  Legal Deserts Threaten Justice In Rural America

  

  Many small towns and rural counties have few lawyers or none at all, which threatens the notion of justice for all Americans and demands creative solutions from legislators, bar associations and law schools, says Patricia Refo, president of the American Bar Association.

• Unusual TikTok Review Calls CFIUS Processes Into Question

  

  The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has departed from established processes in its national security investigation of TikTok, with comments from across the Trump administration casting doubt on the interagency committee's confidentiality, apolitical nature and focus, says Paul Marquardt at Cleary.

• CFAA Decision May Raise Bar On Scraping Liability

  

  A D.C. federal court recently held in Sandvig v. Barr that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act does not prohibit scraping publicly accessible portions of a website, even when doing so violates the website's terms of service, which is similar to the Ninth Circuit's 2019 hiQ v. LinkedIn decision and may influence scraping law in the coming years, say attorneys at ​​​​Perkins Coie.

• Analyzing Upward And Downward Trends In Legal Tech

  

  Advances in legal technology are often accompanied by bombastic overstatements, but it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff by looking at where various technologies stand on the hype curve, says Lance Eliot at Stanford Law School.

• Opinion

  ABA's New Guidance On Litigation Funding Misses The Mark

  

  The American Bar Association should revise its recently approved best practices on third-party litigation funding as they do not reflect how legal finance actually works and could create confusion among lawyers, says Andrew Cohen at Burford Capital.

• 3 Cases Spotlight Shareholder Interest In Public Co. Diversity

  

  Recent derivative claims filed in a California federal court over diversity and inclusion shortcomings at Oracle, Facebook and Qualcomm demonstrate shareholder willingness to hold directors and officers accountable for public companies' failure to deliver on environmental, social and governance commitments, say attorneys at Cleary.

• What Firms Should Ask Before Hiring Attorneys From Gov't

  

  In the final year of any presidential administration, there is an undeniable appetite on the part of large law firms for government-savvy legal talent, but firms need to first consider how they will actually utilize their new star hire, says Michael Ellenhorn at Decipher.

• The Ethics Of Using Chatbots For Legal Services

  

  Delegating legal work to robots involves several risks, including running afoul of statutes dictating unauthorized practice of law, but with the right precautions, law firms can lawfully employ artificially intelligent chatbots that can imitate human conversations, say attorneys at Haynes and Boone.

• Market Rebound May Curb Securities Class Actions, Damages

  

  The stock market's dramatic recovery from its pandemic-prompted plunge may provide securities class action defendants an opportunity to rely on the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act’s rarely invoked bounce-back provision to ward off stock-drop claims, or sharply limit available damages, say John Schreiber and John Tschirgi at Winston & Strawn.

• Houston Rockets' Virus Coverage Claims Face Key Hurdles

  

  The NBA's Houston Rockets' recent insurance coverage claims for interruption losses due to COVID-19 may not survive summary judgment or trial because of clearly worded policy requirements and the absence of direct physical damage, say Glenn Jacobson and Mark Binsky at Abrams Gorelick.

• Opinion

  ABA Must Seize Opportunity To Respond To Bar Exam Chaos

  

  The challenges of administering bar exams this year have put the future of the profession in jeopardy, but the American Bar Association at its ongoing annual meeting can adopt a resolution that would urge jurisdictions to take emergency actions with respect to licensure of new attorneys, says Nicholas Allard, former president of Brooklyn Law School.

• How Pandemic Is Affecting The Pace Of Judicial Opinions

  

  The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way judges work, but how has it impacted the volume of work product they generate? Ben Strawn and Omeed Azmoudeh at Davis Graham investigate using data from the PACER federal courts registry.

• High Court TCPA Case May Curb Robocall Class Actions

  

  The U.S. Supreme Court recently granted certiorari in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act case, Facebook v. Duguid, that has the potential to transform the statutory definition of autodialer and make it much more difficult for plaintiffs to prevail in robocall cases, says David Poell at Sheppard Mullin.