Jay-Z Appeals Buzbee Win In Rapper's Defamation Suit

By Rae Ann Varona

Music mogul Jay-Z's counsel fought uphill Thursday to convince a California state appeals court to revive claims that Texas attorney Tony Buzbee defamed and extorted him by roping him into a sexual abuse suit against Sean "Diddy" Combs, arguing in court that a trial court erroneously read evidence in Buzbee's favor.

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11th Circ. Denies YouTube Bid For Atty Fees In Copyright Fight

By Ivan Moreno

The Eleventh Circuit on Thursday upheld a Florida federal judge's refusal to award attorney fees to YouTube after the platform defeated copyright claims accusing it of failing to remove pirated films, finding no abuse of discretion in the lower court's analysis.

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Snap Must Face YouTube Creators' DMCA AI Scraping Suit

By Elliot Weld

A California federal judge has denied a bid from the company that owns video-messaging app Snapchat to escape allegations from a group of YouTube creators that their content was illegally ingested to train artificial intelligence, saying the YouTubers had sufficiently laid out how users encounter measures meant to protect videos.

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Facebook Whistleblower Fights For Right To Promote Memoir

By Bonnie Eslinger

An ex-Facebook executive who wrote a whistleblower memoir urged a California federal judge Thursday to toss a preliminary arbitration decision blocking her from promoting the book or disparaging Meta, while the company countered that she agreed to resolve such disputes by arbitration when she accepted a $780,000 payout.

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Q&A

Lakers Sale Fight Offers M&A Lessons For Family Businesses

By Al Barbarino

The agreement by former Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner to acquire the Los Angeles Lakers at a record $12.5 billion valuation appeared, at first, to be another example of the seemingly endless rise in professional sports franchise values.

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Entertainment-Focused VC Firm Wraps $250M Fund

By Jade Martinez-Pogue

Interactive entertainment-focused venture capital firm Makers Fund on Thursday revealed that it has closed its latest fund with $250 million in tow, bringing the firm's total assets under management to $1.5 billion.

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Deals Rumor Mill

KKR Lobs $9B Takeover Offer At UGI, Plus More Rumors

By Jade Martinez-Pogue

Private equity behemoth KKR offered to acquire natural gas distributor UGI Corp. for $9 billion, fast-fashion company Shein is eyeing a $25 billion valuation ahead of its anticipated Hong Kong initial public offering, and e-commerce giant Alibaba sold its game developer business to Trustar Capital in a $2 billion deal. Here, Law360 breaks down the notable deal rumors from the past week.

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Meta Atty 'Absolutely Wrong' On Client Privilege, Judge Warns

By Dorothy Atkins

With trial dark Thursday due to juror illness, a California judge overseeing states' claims that Meta Platforms Inc. hid social media's harms heard arguments over evidence, at one point criticizing Meta's efforts to assert attorney-client privilege and calling the company's in-house lawyer "absolutely wrong" about the appropriate standard.

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Instagram Algorithm Czar Tells Jury Safety Helps Profits

By Cara Salvatore

The Instagram executive responsible for the algorithm kicked off Meta's defense case Thursday over Tennessee's claims it concealed harm to youths' mental health, testifying the company's efforts to protect children also protect its bottom line.

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UnitedHealthcare Beats User's Data Privacy Suit, For Good

By Gina Kim

UnitedHealthcare Services Inc. permanently beat a proposed class action alleging that its website's third-party tracking pixels shared information about its visitors, after a California federal judge said Wednesday that "the mere collection of plaintiff's generic insurance browsing data is not enough to demonstrate" concrete injury.

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Zumba Video Buyers Nab Class Cert. In Data Sharing Row

By Allison Grande

A Florida federal judge has granted certification to a main class and three subclasses in litigation accusing Zumba Fitness LLC of violating the federal Video Privacy Protection Act by divulging information about those who purchased on-demand training videos to Meta Platforms Inc. and others, finding that such disputes are "tailor made" for certification.

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Social Media Cos. Fight Bid To Merge 2 Bellwether Trials In LA

By Craig Clough

An attorney for two plaintiffs set to be the second and third bellwether trials out of thousands of lawsuits alleging social media platforms caused children mental health harm urged a Los Angeles judge Thursday to combine their trials into one, although a Meta attorney said they are "fundamentally different cases."

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Nintendo Customer Fights To Keep Tariff Refund Suit Alive

By Kevin Pinner

A Washington federal court should deny Nintendo's attempt to escape a proposed class action seeking reimbursement of costs that customers paid toward President Donald Trump's since-invalidated global tariff regime now that the company is pursuing refunds, a customer told the court.

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Trade Groups Back Apple In 9th Circ. Class Decert. Fight

By Bryan Koenig

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other trade and advocacy groups backed Apple Wednesday with amicus briefs telling the Ninth Circuit to reject an appeal from consumers looking to undo the decertification of a class of roughly 200 million people in an antitrust case targeting App Store policies.

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Ticket Buyers Ask 2nd Circ. To Nix Live Nation Arbitration

By Matthew Perlman

Concertgoers who purchased tickets on the secondary market are asking the Second Circuit to vacate a lower court's decision forcing them to arbitrate their antitrust claims against Live Nation and its Ticketmaster unit.

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TikTok's Ex-Legal Head Made Racist Comments, Suit Says

By Bonnie Eslinger

TikTok and its former head of global legal operations have been accused in a California state court lawsuit of harassment and discrimination based on race and sex by a former legal department employee who claims the executive subjected her and other nonwhite colleagues to an "unrelenting campaign of harassment."

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Frontier's $14M Deal In 401(k) Verizon Stock Suit Gets 1st OK

By Aneeta Mathur-Ashton

A Connecticut federal judge has given his initial OK to a $14 million settlement Frontier Communications Corp. has reached to end a proposed class action over claims its employee 401(k) plan was overinvested in Verizon Wireless and other telecommunications stocks.

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Group Demands Docs Over Feds' Immigration 'Propaganda'

By Ganesh Setty

A legal advocacy nonprofit accused the Trump administration in Washington, D.C., federal court Thursday of failing to provide information on the extent that taxpayer dollars were used to "fund propaganda while thwarting legitimate journalism" over its immigration enforcement efforts.

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Lenders Sue Over $1M Loan Tied To Cannabis Farm

By Jonathan Capriel

A group of California lenders is trying to claw back a $1 million loan that was supposed to launch a cannabis farm in Miranda, claiming they learned too late that the property had already lost its permits to grow and that the borrowers had misused most of the loan proceeds.

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J&J Talc Unit Loses Libel Suit Over Flawed Cancer Study

By Dorothy Atkins

A Virginia federal judge handed three doctors a win Wednesday in a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary's libel lawsuit over a 2020 study linking cosmetic talc exposure to mesothelioma, finding the subsidiary's evidence didn't show the trio knowingly or recklessly published falsehoods and instead merely revealed the doctors' "fear of litigation."

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Amazon v. Perplexity Ruling Limits CFAA Reach Over AI Tools

The Ninth Circuit's recent decision in Amazon v. Perplexity provides important early guidance on how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act applies to agentic artificial intelligence, and is the latest in a line of rulings in which courts have declined to stretch existing statutes to broadly regulate AI, say attorneys at Ropes & Gray.

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Series

Being In A Band Made Me A Better Lawyer

Playing shows in storied New York City venues and rehearsing with my bandmates in poorly ventilated rooms helped develop the professional qualities I rely on as a litigator, including an ability to collaborate with strong-minded equals and the determination to treat each client with singular focus, says Eliad Shapiro at Herrick Feinstein.

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How Does In-House Pay Compare? Take The Law360 Survey

How do in-house salaries vary across industries, roles, and organizational revenue? What compensation tools are companies using to lure top talent? Help Law360 Pulse answer these questions and more in this year's In-House Compensation Survey.

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Uber Gets Greenlight On Most Fraud Claims Against LA Firms

By Hailey Konnath

A California federal judge Wednesday largely rejected two Los Angeles personal injury firms' attempts to ditch Uber's suit claiming it's being targeted by a scheme involving fraudulent personal injury claims, finding Uber has plausibly alleged that the firms schemed with a surgeon to rack up medical costs.

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Trump Taps DOJ Official, ND Solicitor General For Judgeships

By Courtney Bublé

President Donald Trump announced Thursday he's tapping Jesus Osete, a top U.S. Department of Justice official, to serve on the Western District of Missouri and Philip Axt, solicitor general of North Dakota, for the District of North Dakota.

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CREXi Drops 9th Circ. Challenge To Quinn Emanuel DQ

By Isaac Monterose

Property listing company Commercial Real Estate Exchange Inc. has moved to dismiss its own Ninth Circuit mandamus petition, which challenged a lower court's disqualification of CREXi's counsel, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, from a legal battle against rival CoStar.

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Eastman Among 16 Calif. Attys Disbarred In Q2 2026

By Emily Sawicki

The State Bar of California removed the licenses of 16 attorneys between April and June of this year over a broad spectrum of ethical breaches ranging from the high-profile case of John Eastman attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, to a lawyer found to be in possession of child sex abuse images.

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