Law Firm Suit For The Outsourcing of Litigation Support

The Annapolis, MD law firm of Newman McIntosh & Hennessey recently filed suit against a legal process outsourcer located in India. The case, filed in US District Court for DC, seeks a ruling from the court on the following question: “Given the pervasive nature of the signals intercept by the United StatesGovernment and UKUSA Allies, will the electronic transmission of data to foreign nationals residing overseas waive Fourth Amendment protections with respect to the data transmitted?” It appears that the law firm also submitted this question to the Ethics Committee of the DC Bar. See here for more info.

Maryland Identity Theft Statute Held Not To Apply To Fictitious Identities

Maryland's highest court recently published a surprising ruling: to be prosecuted under the Maryland identity theft statute (Criminal Law Article 8-301), one must have stolen the identity of an actual person. The statute does not apply, the court reasoned, in cases where an individual commits identity theft using a fictitious identity. The majority of the case centers on an analysis of the term "another" in the statute. After delving into the statute's legislative history, the court determined that "another" must refer to an actual person for the statute to apply.

New CAN-SPAM Rules

The FTC recently (May 12) recently published a new final rule implementing the CAN-SPAM Act (15 U.S.C. 7701-7713). For a brief overview of the new rules, see here. For the Press Release announcing the new rules, see here. For a more detailed overview of the rules, see this article from B2B.

New Net Neutrality Bill

Representative John Conyers (D-Mich) recently introduced (May 8th) a new bill (HR 5994) on net neutrality dubbed the ‘‘Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2008." This is the the most recent of a series of bills on this issue. Other notable bills dealing with net neutrality include HR 5353, S 215, HR 5417, and S.2917. For a list of net neutrality bills which have been introduced, see this Wikipedia article.

EDiscovery Vendor Suits

For those of you that missed the news a few months back, the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell agreed to settle with ediscovery vendor Electronic Data Discovery. Sullivan & Cromwell had sued the vendor for alledly providing sub-par work. See this article for more info. The case is important because it could be the first of many similar suits.

Rambus Wins On Appeal

As this Law.com article reports, the ongoing litigation between Samsung and Rambus seems to have come to a close. The Rambus case had caught the attention of the legal community because of allegations that Rambus had shredded millions of documents prior to initiating a slew of litigation. The opinion published April 30 overturns previous decisions on the grounds that they did not have the requisit jurisdiction. For more on the history of the case, see the Rambus.org website.