By Taimur Rabbani, Esq and Andrew Campbell On December 17, 2018, the Small Business Runway Extension Act of 2018 (Runway Extension Act) was signed into law. The law was designed to change how certain companies evaluated their historical revenues when determining whether or not they qualified as a small business. The SBA to date has...
Category: Corporate Law
Counsel Needs to Focus on Developing Company’s Legal IQ
By Carol L. O’Riordan A current article in Corporate Counsel magazine asks the critical question: What’s your company’s legal IQ? The article points out that these days, legal issues are often quite diffused within sizable companies, so that managers don’t always recognize them as such. In addition, corporate legal departments haven’t necessarily done a good job...
In-House GC’s: Their Crucial Role in Corporate Compliance
By Pamela J. Bethel What role should in-house lawyers play in assuring that corporate compliance standards are met? Should companies have a separate compliance department, or should it be part of the legal department and report to the general counsel? Mitratech, an Austin, Tex.-based consulting firm that works with corporate legal departments, just issued a...
A Big Win for Privilege in Internal Corporate Investigations
By Pamela J. Bethel Last May, we wrote in this blog that we hoped and expected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse a district judge’s opinion and to permit companies to assert attorney-client privilege for internal documents created in the course of a bona fide investigation by inside counsel. If...
New Article: Putting Profitability Into the Pipeline
On August 14, 2014, partner Carol L. O’Riordan and associate Anthony J. Marchese published an article titled “Putting Organization, Compliance and Improved Profitability into the Pipeline” in the Utility Contractor magazine. The article notes that after a contract is signed and while work is proceeding, a company, such as a construction company, should name one...
Is it Safer to Discuss Some Things with Outside Counsel? (Pt. 3)
By Carol O’Riordan and Jay Shah In our last blog post, we discussed a recent New Mexico case in which the court wrestled with the question of how to determine whether a communication was primarily made for business purposes or for legal purposes. This question was important because it was the deciding factor in showing...
Is it Safer to Discuss Some Things with Outside Counsel? (Pt. 2)
By Carol O’Riordan and Jay Shah How should courts go about deciding, in close cases, whether an internal memorandum constitutes privileged legal advice or discoverable business advice? Bhandari v. Artesia Gen. Hospital, the New Mexico case discussed in our previous post, is illustrative. It involved an employment dispute between a hospital corporation and two doctors...
Is it Safer to Discuss Some Things with Outside Counsel?
By Carol O’Riordan and Jay Shah Does the attorney-client privilege apply less definitively to in-house counsel than to outside attorneys? About a year ago, the New Mexico Court of Appeals ruled in Bhandari v. Artesia General Hospital that a memo written by a hospital’s general counsel regarding an employee’s termination was not privileged because it...
To Protect Your Secrets, Get a Non-Disclosure Agreement in Advance
By Anthony Marchese As we highlighted in our previous post on the C.R.T.R case in federal court in Massachusetts, any company that entrusts independent contractors with proprietary information runs the risk that this information could be misused to the company’s detriment. In the absence of any agreement to the contrary, independent contractors are under no...
No Confidentiality Agreement, No Trade-Secret Protection
By Anthony Marchese A Massachusetts lower-court ruling from earlier this year in the area of trade secrets law has drawn a good deal of attention and is worth noting here. In this case, C.R.T.R., Inc. v. Lao, a recycling company called C.R.T.R. hired Kenneth Lao as an independent contractor to help run the business. Lao...