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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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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USPTO Tells Fed. Circ. 'Settled Expectations' Is Constitutional

By Ryan Davis

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has urged the Federal Circuit to reject Google's constitutional challenge to the office's "settled expectations" policy of taking the age of patents into account when deciding whether to review them, saying the rule is "eminently rational."

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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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Fashion Biz Founder Gets 5 Years For Large-Scale Fraud

By Pete Brush

A federal judge in New York sentenced the founder of bankrupt apparel company CaaStle to five years in prison on Thursday after she admitted to deceiving investors about the prospects of her supposed $1.4 billion business to fraudulently raise nearly $300 million.

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Sens. Call On FINRA To Update Rules To Curb Transfer Fraud

By Sarah Jarvis

U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., urged the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to boost consumer protections to prevent brokerage fraud through the Automated Customer Account Transfer Service, pointing to "structural weaknesses" in the system they say bad actors are exploiting to drain customers' brokerage accounts.

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Latest Squires Order Grants 2 Patent Petitions, Denies None

By Theresa Schliep

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director John Squires has issued a brief bulk order instituting a pair of America Invents Act petitions, including a Google challenge to a Valtrus Innovations patent, and saying he would assess the merits of four other patent challenges.

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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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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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Judge Tosses Sports Scoring System Patent Case

By Elliot Weld

A Florida federal judge has dismissed a suit by a man who claimed his co-inventor on a patent covering a method for scoring sports games conspired to remove his name from inventorship, saying no actual consequences of having his name removed were alleged.

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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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DC Court Says It'll Hear ABC's Arguments Against FCC In Oct.

By Nadia Dreid

ABC was hoping to get before a D.C. federal judge as early as Friday to make its arguments for a temporary restraining order against the Federal Communications Commission in its retaliation suit, but the court dashed the Disney-owned network's hopes Thursday afternoon by setting the hearing for early October.

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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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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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Estee Lauder's TM Suit 'Full Of Detail,' Judge Tells Walmart

By Craig Clough

A California federal judge said Thursday he is skeptical of Walmart's motion to dismiss much of Estee Lauder's lawsuit accusing the retail giant of selling infringing beauty products online, saying he is unsure the pleadings are inadequate at this stage because he found them "chock full of detail."

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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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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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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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Patent Holders Sue Data Center Co. Over Cooling Tech

By Isaac Monterose

Two Irish patent-holding companies have accused Sabey Data Center Properties LLC in Virginia federal court of using data center cooling technology in a way that infringes their patents.

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Johns Hopkins Hit With Sex Discrimination, Retaliation Suit

By Gianna Ferrarin

Johns Hopkins University was hit with a complaint in California federal court alleging it impaired a graduate student's educational access and retaliated against her after she returned from a pregnancy-related leave and accused her former adviser of sexual misconduct.

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Brief

Motorola Wants Rival Hytera's Latest Radio Added To IP Fight

By Lauraann Wood

Motorola Solutions Inc. is looking to expand its mobile radio fight against Chinese rival Hytera Communications with allegations targeting the H-Series radio Hytera has already been held in contempt for developing with too much stolen source code following its initial multimillion-dollar trade secret trial loss.

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Mitsubishi Electric Agrees To Acquire PCI Energy For $1.4B

By Al Barbarino

Mitsubishi Electric Corp. said Thursday it has agreed to acquire U.S. energy-management software provider PCI Energy Solutions for $1.4 billion, expanding its presence in the North American power market.

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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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Sangamo Ch. 11 Auction Nets $238M In Offers

By Clara Geoghegan

A Delaware bankruptcy judge Thursday agreed to approve a trio of sales that will bring in $52 million in cash for Sangamo Therapeutics, after attorneys representing the life sciences group told the court a competitive Chapter 11 auction ended with four winning bids worth over $238 million.

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Conscious Content's $3M DIP Boost Faces Creditor Pushback

By Yun Park

A Delaware bankruptcy judge Thursday said he would consider ed-tech company Conscious Content Media's request for $3 million in additional Chapter 11 financing next week, after the creditors committee pushed back against the debtor's expedited schedule and said it needed more time to review the request.

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Corridor TV To Pay $27,000 For Emergency Broadcast Misses

By Aneeta Mathur-Ashton

Corridor Television will pay a voluntary contribution of $27,000 to resolve an investigation from the Federal Communications Commission into whether it submitted misleading information about its participation in three nationwide tests of the Emergency Alert System.

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SEC Won't Lift Trading Suspension On Chinese Biotech Firm

By Sarah Jarvis

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has upheld Nasdaq's decision to delist the stock of Shineco Inc. after the Chinese biotech firm repeatedly violated the exchange's listing requirements, rejecting the company's arguments that a Nasdaq hearing panel reached its decision too quickly and did not properly consider plans for new operations at Shineco.

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HEICO Exec Arrested, Accused Of $1.8M Insider Trading Ploy

By Stewart Bishop

A senior HEICO Corp. executive was arrested Thursday and charged with securities fraud for what Manhattan federal prosecutors say were multiple instances of insider trading in the stock of the publicly traded aerospace and technology company.

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GAO Says Army Lacks Information To Plan Network Overhaul

By Elaine Briseño

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a Thursday report that the U.S. Army has earmarked $3.3 billion this fiscal year for modernizing battlefield communication networks, but lacks enough information to determine if the program is sustainable.

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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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Fed. Circ. Rulings Emphasize Adjudicative Access And Review

Decisions from the Federal Circuit's 2026 docket indicate that the court is increasingly paying attention to whether tribunals possess authority to act, meaning practitioners will need to properly address procedural hurdles before they can argue the merits of a case, say attorneys at Reichman Jorgensen.

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Monitor Exposure, Stay Flexible Amid Tariff Uncertainty

To navigate an unstable trade environment, businesses must evaluate their exposure to new tariffs invoked under a patchwork of statutory authorities and be prepared to adapt to further changes that may be on the horizon, says Bhargav Prajapati at Capital Trade.

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CFPB Complaint Portal Overhaul Signals Changing Priorities

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's updates to its consumer complaint portal and decision to cease publishing consumer complaint narratives should be viewed by companies as one component of a larger recalibration of how the CFPB collects information and allocates its supervisory and enforcement resources, say attorneys at Cooley.

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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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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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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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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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