Non-compete agreements were originally intended to prevent high-level executives from taking trade secrets and client relationships to a competitor, but companies have recently been expanding their use of non-compete agreements to almost all their employment contracts, even with workers earning minimum wage. It has become a way to lock low-wage…
Contracts are ubiquitous. Every company is a party to numerous different contracts. Leases, purchase agreements, vendor agreements, supply contracts, and employment agreements are just a few of the contracts that a company typically enters in the normal course of business. The parties to a contract expect the other to live…
A doctor who owned her own practice, billed her patients directly, and filed taxes as a self-employed physician was not an employee of the hospital she had privileges at, and therefore was not entitled to sue the hospital for discrimination after it revoked her practice privileges. For almost 13 years,…
This month the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019 (“CASE Act”) was introduced in the Senate (S. 1273) by a number of Senators including Dick Durbin of Illinois and in the House (H.R. 2426) by Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Doug Collins. The CASE Act seeks to provide individual…
A small producer of musical instruments sued Guitar Center, alleging that Guitar Center violated its trademark on the name for a line of woodwind instruments. The plaintiff made a mistake in its suit, however, and named several subsidiary corporations of Guitar Center as additional defendants. After a trial, a jury…
Recently, a unanimous U.S. Third Circuit appellate court upheld payroll company Automatic Data Processing’s (“ADP”) non-compete agreements but remanded the case to the district court for tailoring. The federal appeals court reversed a decision by the district court which had found the covenants not to compete to be unenforceable. In…
A class action lawsuit recently filed in a federal court in Washington accuses Getty Images, Inc. (“Getty”) of allegedly duping customers into paying for fictitious copyright licenses for images in the public domain that can be used freely. The plaintiff in the case, Texas digital marketing company CixxFive Concepts LLC,…
No withstanding allegations of majority shareholder oppression, the Seventh Circuit rejected those arguments paying deference to the business judgment rule because of the Indiana Legislature’s directive to give officers and directors a wide berth for their business decisions. The Court observed: “Indiana has statutorily implemented a strongly pro-management version of…