Recently in Technology Category

It's no secret that Yahoo has been tossing executives and employees aside frequently lately as the company tries to stop its long slide towards obscurity and irrelevance.  Six months ago, Yahoo's top IP lawyer, Joe Siino, left the company, and now two more attorneys have decided to jump ship. 

Reggie Davis, Yahoo's "click fraud czar" has left to become general counsel at Zynga, a video game company.  Davis was the subject of some controversy a few years back after another Yahoo lawyer, Eulonda Skyles, accused Davis of sex and race discrimination after she came back from a maternity leave.  Davis was associate general counsel at the time, and the accusation is widely credited as prompting his move into the Search Marketing Division, although Yahoo denies this.

Virtually every company collects data about its customers.  This ensures that almost every company is subject to some privacy law or another.  Most likely, a company's activities fall under a combination of state and federal laws and regulations, which can make keeping track of legal requirements - and any changes to those requirements that may occur - a difficult job for the company's legal department.

To help alleviate this dilemma for in house counsel, Matthew Savare, Mary J. Hildebrand and Robert D. Chesler have written an article in The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel outlining the various privacy concerns most commonly faced by companies.  While the article doesn't go into every privacy law and regulation, it does give a good introductory outline of the types of things companies should watch out for.

If you work in the legal department of a start-up funded by venture capital, odds are you have been doing financing rounds less often and raising less per round than in times past. 

Fenwick & West has backed up this anecdotal observation with a survey containing some less-than-encouraging numbers for Silicon Valley tech firms that rely on VC. 

Your computer may be personal again, but apparently the legal department at HP isn't anymore. 

This article from the Recorder describes a legal department that shifted from a stable environment for people to escape from the pressures of BigLaw and work out the rest of their careers in comfort, to a department focused sharply on performance evaluations and management re-shuffles. 

It looks like the antitrust scene is starting to heat up again. 

First, Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the DoJ's Antitrust Division, announced that the DoJ under President Obama would pursue antitrust charges more vigorously than under the Bush administration. 

The technology industry is up in arms over President Barack Obama's plans to roll back some of the tax protections for companies that enjoy the benefit of lower tax rates on profits earned outside the United States.

Tech giants Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. each saved more than $1 billion through lower foreign tax rates last year, for a total tax benefit of $7.4 billion.

In this post, guest authors Mary Mack and Dennis Kiker examine the implications of an eDiscovery decision suggesting that authentication of electronically stored information will soon become a major issue during litigation.  The authors predict that this opinion will take on great importance in future eDiscovery cases.

Authenticating electronic evidence in civil trials is coming into its own. In May 2007, Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm, in Lorraine v. Markel Am. Ins. Co ., set down persuasive parameters for authenticating evidence. Lorraine, which is getting more traction by the day, establishes guidelines for admitting electronically stored information (ESI) into evidence. It goes beyond the "breathalyzer" standard of In re Vee Vinhnee. If, as Judge Grimm predicts, the bar in civil court for ESI authentication is about to be raised, his opinion could take on landmark proportions. That's why it's imperative to understand the practical and strategic implications of Lorraine.

Cisco Systems, the maker of networking equipment, has announced its intent to purchase Tidal Software for $105 million in cash and retention-based incentives.

Tidal Software, headquartered in San Jose, CA and Houston, TX produces software that helps companies manage, automate and coordinate their applications.  The company's products include tools to monitor application performance and schedule jobs across machines and platforms.