Texas

Expert Analysis

• Building A Law Firm Knowledge Bank For Thought Leadership

  

  Marketing professionals often do not have firsthand knowledge of current legal trends and client issues, so law firms need to commit to an ongoing knowledge extraction process — a series of steps to draw out attorney insights that can help marketers create effective and frequent thought leadership content, says Michelle Calcote King at Reputation Ink.

• Opinion

  Biden's Immigration Plan Should Do More to Protect Workers

  

  The Biden administration's pathway to citizenship plan is a critical first step to immigration reform, but policy should also protect workers by bolstering labor standards, addressing the criminalization of immigrants and disentangling criminal justice from immigration enforcement, says Rebecca Galemba at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

• Cos. Should Keep A Close Watch On SIGPR Enforcement

  

  The special inspector general for pandemic recovery is enlisting help from other agencies to broadly exercise its enforcement mandate, and there is no better time than now for companies to ensure they are documenting use of relief funds, particularly if they borrowed from more than one program, say attorneys at Cadwalader.

• Let's Emerge From The Pandemic As Legal Innovators

  

  The pandemic forced a digital reckoning on the legal profession — which switched to remote workforces, paperless workflows and digital signatures seemingly overnight — and law firms and corporate legal departments can keep up the innovation momentum with three guiding principles, says Kevin Clem at HBR Consulting.

• Key Trade Secret Developments Of 2020: Part 2

  

  Last year, federal courts issued several important rulings on trade secret issues that will affect litigation practice, including the importance of narrow, well-supported sealing requests, whether refining trade secret identification after discovery is permissible, and when punitive damages comport with due process, say attorneys at Faegre Drinker.

• How Biden's Administration Will Affect The Insurance Industry

  

  President Joe Biden's administration has signaled interest in a range of key issues — consumer protections, regulation of the cannabis industry and health care reform — that will have outsize influence on the private insurance market, say Adrian Azer and Wes Dutton at Haynes and Boone.

• Opinion

  DOJ Charging Memo Rescission Aids Prosecutorial Discretion

  

  The U.S. Department of Justice's recent rescission of a 2017 memo that required prosecutors to charge federal defendants with the offenses that would carry the most severe penalties should be welcomed by prosecutors associations as supporting prosecutorial discretion, even when the new policy may lead to leniency, says Marc Levin at the Council on Criminal Justice.

• Anticipating Predictive Analytics' Potential Uses In Litigation

  

  Predictive analytics — the marriage of statistics and machine learning now commonly used in litigation for document review and production — will soon likely bring exciting new uses in discovery and beyond, offering attorneys more data-driven ways to establish facts and predict case outcomes, say Richard Finkelman and Karl Schliep at Berkeley Research Group.

• The State Of Asylum Law After Trump — And What's Next

  

  Kevin Gregg at Kurzban Kurzban discusses the impact of asylum decisions issued during the Trump administration's final year, the uncertainty underlying President Joe Biden’s tranche of immigration-related executive orders and reasons for cautious optimism within the immigration community.

• Opinion

  This Black History Month, Law Firms Should Challenge Norms

  

  With so little progress made in the diversification of the legal industry, Black History Month is a good time for law firms to adjust their organizational cultures, ensuring that diversity and inclusion goals are transparent and measured in the same way billable hour and other core targets are — through written, enforceable policies, says Paulette Brown at Locke Lord.

• Payday Lending May Face Greater CFPB Scrutiny Under Biden

  

  In light of expectations the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will increase surveillance of payday lending during the Biden administration, financial services companies should diligently document the reasonableness of credit they extend to consumers affected by the pandemic, say attorneys at King & Spalding.

• 4 Takeaways For States From 1st Circ. Wire Act Lottery Ruling

  

  The First Circuit's recent decision in NH Lottery Commission v. Rosen, that state-run, intrastate, online lotteries can continue to operate, may precipitate significant growth in the gambling industry despite limitations on online wagering, say attorneys at White & Case.

• Series

  Judges On Race

  

  On the heels of nationwide calls to address systemic racism and inequality, five sitting state and federal judges shed light on the disparities that exist in the justice system and how to guard against bias in this series of Law360 guest articles.

• Law Firm Penalties On Departing Partners Just Got Riskier

  

  A D.C. appeals court's recent decision in Jacobson Holman v. Gentner sharply limiting the ability of law firms to financially penalize departing partners continues a clear trend among court rulings and bar ethics opinions, and should encourage firms to review their partnership agreements for any ethical land mines, says Alan Kabat at Bernabei & Kabat.

• How Parties Can Prep For Global FRAND Jurisdictional Battles

  

  As courts worldwide increasingly vie for jurisdiction in litigation over standard-essential patents licensed on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, parties should consider courts' capabilities, the local market's importance, and choice of law in their preferred venues, and carefully tailor remedy requests in complaints, says Brian Johnson at Steptoe & Johnson.