Eastern District of Texas Federal Court Practice

Starting a New Law Office: Ethical Concerns and Practical Pointers - TexasBarCLE webcast

I will be moderating an upcoming TexasBarCLE webcast next month Starting a New Law Office: Ethical Concerns and Practical Pointers.  The seminar is live via webcast on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. CST.  The webcast counts for 1.5 hours MCLE credit, with one hour of that being ethics credit.  The registration fee is $95 - to get more information or register, click here.  The webcast arose out of the work I was doing on a paper on the subject that is slated for publication in the July issue of the Texas Bar Journal, so the webcast paper will be essentially the Bar Journal paper (at least that's the plan).

Topics include:

• Leaving your old firm: compensation issues, malpractice insurance coverage, file retention, taking clients, client notification
• Creating your new firm: setting up your business entity, EIN, bank accounts, etc.
• Setting up your new office
• Running your new office: pro-bono cases, filing system, supplies, software, legal research, employment contract and letters of engagement, calendaring system
• Client relations: advertising, internet presence

Faculty is:

• Michael Smith, Marshall - Siebman, Reynolds, Burg, Phillips & Smith LLP
  
• Rob Crain, Dallas - Crain Lewis, LLP
• Laura Benitez Geisler, Dallas - Jones Geisler, LLP

If you're not able to watch the webcast live, about a week after the webcast, the program will be archived at TexasBarCLE.com, and you can watch it there.  Doesn't matter whether you signed up ahead of time and couldn't make it, or signed up afterwards - either way you can watch the webcast at your leisure.  I've watched a couple of these recently and really liked the format - you can sit at your desk and watch a seminar of interest to you, pausing it as needed to handle work that can't be put off.

Patent Reform Act - presentation at TADC seminar

This Thursday I'll be in Dallas speaking at the Texas Association of Defense Counsel's 2008 Intellectual Property Seminar at the Belo Mansion (home of the Dallas Bar Association).  My assigned topic is "Everything You Need to Know About the Patent Reform Act."  The lineup for a seminar looks like a good one - here's a copy of the brochure Download Brochure.pdf

"Intellectual Property Causes of Action" - SBOT Causes of Action seminar

I'm course director for the State Bar's Causes of Action seminar again this year, and worked the Dallas session last Thursday and Friday at the CityPlace conference center (great room but enormously confusing layout otherwise).  That included reprising my 2006 "Intellectual Property Causes of Action" paper from 2006.  As I told the crowd, I had had to make a lot of changes to the patent section of the paper since I last gave it in 2006, what with eBay, In re Seagate and all the other recent decision drastically changing the landscape of patent litigation.  I must have gotten them right because David Donaldson of Graves Doughtery (who was speaking on libel and slander) was all but flashing on Bic lighters in the back row as I went through the recent caselaw changes.   (I'm not quite sure why he was so excited, but I could see his head bobbing up and down all the way through my talk).
The COA road show next moves to Houston on May 15-16, with a video reprise in Austin on July 10-11.  If you're in need of up 11.75 hours of MCLE credit, you can sign up here - you get a free O'Connor's Causes of Action book, and as most Texas practitioners I know will tell you - it's even better than the O'Connor's Federal Rules and the picture on the back cover is better looking (not that I'm contractually obligated to say that or anything).
Seriously, this year we have a really outstanding lineup of speakers, and no one practicing in Texas ought to be without the COA book.  It's an enourmouse time-saver when researching whether you can bring some kind of a case on behalf of a client, or what defenses you can assert to a claim.

"Recent Developments in the Eastern District of Texas: How They Affect Patent Law, E-Commerce and the Internet": ABA Section of Business Law Spring Meeting - Dallas, Texas April 10-12, 2008

I posted a couple of days ago on the panel I am chairing in Arlington Virginia this Friday on patent litigation in the Eastern District of Texas at the ABA's IP seminar.  In a truly bizarre twist of scheduling, I am presenting another paper on basically the same subject at the ABA's Business Law seminar less than 24 hours later in Dallas. 
Unfortunately, the papers have almost nothing in common - I'm really not quite sure how I managed that, because it certainly wasn't my intent.  The first is essentially a lengthy summary of major Eastern District patent cases in the past year, with a few older cases tossed in where needed to illustrate a practice point.  It is for the most part basically the 2007 update to the caselaw portion of the Eastern District Update paper that I presented  March of last year at the State Bar of Texas IP section's seminar in Dallas.  The Dallas paper, on the other hand, is more focused on appellate treatment of Eastern District of Texas cases in the past year, since the nut of that topic is any major developments in patent law, e-commerce of the Internet which have some sort of Eastern District of Texas connection.
Next week I'm chairing the State Bar's Causes of Action seminar in Dallas, where I'm presenting my IP Causes of Action paper - I'll post more on that later but it was really an eye-opener how much the patent section of the paper had to be revised to accommodate the new caselaw since I last gave it in 2006 at this same seminar. I had summarized that caselaw in the Texas Bar Journal Patent Litigation article in January, but this was the first time I actually folded it into an existing paper and saw how extensive the changes in patent caselaw in the last two years have been. 

"A Battle Over Where the War is to be Fought - Venue in Patent Cases" - The Advocate

The second article, which I'm afraid doesn't seem to be available online yet, and in paper only to members of the Litigation Section of the State Bar of Texas is an article in the Winter 2007 edition of the Section's quarterly publication The Advocate.  That issue is a symposium issue entitled "Jurisdiction & Venue" and my contribution is the lead-off article "A Battle Over Where the War is to be Fought - Venue in Patent Cases", found at pages 10-13.  It's a short article outlining the text and history of the current patent venue statute, with an analysis of the activity to date of the pending patent legislation.  Luckily for me, nothing substantive has happened in Congress since I submitted the article, so for at least the next month or so, the article is fairly current.
The Litigation Section's new website is where to look for the article online when it is uploaded.  I would also mention that the issue contains a good article on litigating before magistrate judges.  I may post on that after studying it a little more.

Update:  Here's a copy of the article - Download venue_in_patent_cases.pdf

Texas Bar Journal "Year in Review" 2007 - "Patent Litigation: A Changing Landscape"

In the middle of my firm change this month (more on that later) I haven't posted on a couple of articles I wrote on patent litigation that came out in Texas legal publications this month.  The first is an article on the changing landscape of patent litigation as part of the Texas Bar Journal's "Year in Review - 2007" in the January 2008 edition.  The entire article is available here Download Year.pdf - my contribution is at page 25.

Federal Update seminar speech - New Federal Rules paper documents

I'm giving a Federal Update speech at the State Bar of Texas Advanced Civil Trial Course in Houston this afternoon.  As I'm promising the attendees, here is a copy of my slide show Download federal_update_act_houston.pdf and copies of the relevant documents on the upcoming 2007 amendments to the federal rules, so they don't have to root for them on uscourts.gov's Rulemaking page..
Download 2007_privacy_ediscovery_amendments.pdf - This document is a report from the Civil Rules Advisory Committee which contains (1) the e-discovery proposed amendments, including proposed FRCP 5.2, and (2) the "style" amendments to the 2006 e-discovery amendments.
Download 2007_style_substance_amendments.pdf - This document is another report from the Civil Rules Advisory Committe, this time detailing the "style/substance" amendments to the FRCPs, which will affect FRCP 4, 9, 11, 14, 16, 26, 30, 31, 40, 71.1 and 78.
Download 2007_style_amendments.pdf - This lengthy document includes both a summary of the style revision process, a side-by-side chart comparing the old and new FRCP 1-86, a riveting appendix A that discuses global drafting issues in the style revision project, and a summary of the changes made after publication and comment.  The document concludes with a lengthy memo on the issue of whether the revised amendments "supersede" conflicting provisions in statutes in effect when the amendments take effect.
Download clean_2007_amended_frcps.pdf - This very lengthy document (357 pages) is a clean copy of the FRCPs as of 12/1/2007, with all the substantive, style/substance/and style changes.
Download FJCAdvisory.pdf - This advisory details the Judicial Conference's new policy requiring attorneys to redact personal information contained in transcripts.

New Frontiers in Family Law - Intellectual Property - Memphis seminar

The seminars I get asked to speak at are getting stranger and stranger.  Two weeks ago it was new federal rules (including e-discovery) at the Texas Association of Defense Counsel's seminar in Santa Fe (I'm a career TTLA member, so that's a little like Texas Democratic Women having Karl Rove over for a little chat) and this weekend it was a panel on intellectual property as a new frontier in divorce law for the State Bar of Texas Family Law Section's annual advanced family law seminar. 

Fortunately it was at the Peabody Hotel (yes, the one with the ducks - my wife Jamie and I duck-watched and bought the t-shirts for our three boys).  We also took the trip to Elvis' home Graceland (pictured) which was, I have to say, totally lacking in anything tacky.  Yes, you heard me right - the outside remains solidly Southern classical (which I didn't expect - I thought there were fiberglass guitars glued to the facade for some reason), and while the inside decor is pretty solidly rooted in the early 1970's, I'll admit, it never veers into what you can really call bad taste, as opposed to outdated taste.  I saw far worse interiors growing up in the 1970's, and I'm not just talking the Brady Bunch.  Elvis' 707 jet Lisa Marie is actually arguably more tastefully done on the inside (outside's not remotely the class act that Raymond Loewy did for President Kennedy) than the Air Force One at the Reagan Library that we saw last summer (POTUS doesn't get gold-plated seat belt buckles).  I couldn't even find anything tacky in the (official) gift shops - everything was tasteful.  Maybe the fat Elvis stuff was across the street, but we didn't have time to check.  (One caveat - having your family buried about six feet from your swimming pool is just plain weird).  The whole thing is very much like a pop version of the Thomas Jefferson experience at Monticello, of which I am just about the most avid member there is, so I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that by any means, but it was a little interesting riff on the cult of personality that we see at presidential museums and ... well, Mickey's house in Cartoonland at Disneyland.  (See my three boys with MM last summer.  It was my wife's favorite picture of the trip because Mickey's office, where he sees visitors is air conditioned to about 45 degrees, which is almost as cold as she likes it.  Why yes, we put leashes on our kids - why do you ask?)

But I digress. For the seminar, our panel chair Warren Cole (who's also on the State Bar board of directors with me) put together a paper with our input giving attendees an overview of patent, copyright and trademark law (the latter two courtesy of Houston copyright guru David Showalter) and then discussed the various classification and valuation issues that come up.  We then had a 2 1/4 hour panel discussion on the various issues that intellectual property presents in the divorce context, including how to determine if it's there, how it is characterized (community or separate) and how you value it and manage it.  From the patent practitioner's perspective, it seemed to me that some patent holding companies might be interested in providing consulting (valuation) and possibly management services for patents that are stuck in the middle of a divorce.  As you might expect, the parties to a divorce and their lawyers are perhaps not the best people to try to figure out what a particular piece of IP is worth, especially with the value changing daily with new cases from the Federal Circuit making major changes in the standards for validity and value of patents.  There was a really enjoyable discussion about business method patents, for example (primarily the possibility that legal strategies might be patentable, which some panel members took and ran with in the family law context) but I suggested that any business method patent jokes might soon become pretty dated so better laugh now while they still arguably exist.

A very good and a very enjoyable seminar, and hopefully my wife didn't pick up anyone's business cards.  I highly recommend both the Peabody's non-French restaurant Capriccio (Italian steakhouse) and Automatic Slim's (nouveau Carribbean, whatever the hell that is) acros the street.  The latter even serves duck if you're sick of the ducks marching bit.  But they wouldn't tell me where they get it from.

"FederaUpdate" - 2007 Litigation Update seminar

Third on the list of papers I haven't posted on is this this pseudo-paper, Federal Update, for the State Bar's 2007 Litigation Update seminar put on by the State Bar and the State Bar Litigation Section.  The paper was by Fifth Circuit judge Edward Prado, but when the seminar was rescheduled from San Antonio to Dallas due to the weather in January I was asked to pinch hit for Judge Prado.  The slides from the presentation are attached here in .pdf handout format.Download 2007_litigation_update_federal_update.pdf Rather than do my usual federal update cases, I just prepared slides on (mostly) Judge Prado's cases, so they are much more of a comprehensive look at recent caselaw in the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court.  (The usual rule update information is in there as well).

"Eastern District Update" paper - 2007 IP Law Update

I also realized this morning that I had not posted anything on the paper and presentation that has taken the most time - by far - of any I've done lately.  I presented an Eastern District of Texas Update paper at the State Bar's Intellectual Property Law Update seminar in Dallas a couple of weeks ago.  Sponsored by the State Bar of Texas' IP Law section, the course is one of the best in the field of IP law in the state, and always well-attended.  (I'm also the State Bar board's liaison to the IP law section, so I have a front row seat to all the good things that they do).

I was asked this year to present an update on activity in the ED over the past year, and I submitted a 35 paper paper, with an 80-odd slide PowerPoint.  Out of deference to all the hard work that the Section and the State Bar put into this program, I am not posting either on the weblog, but the paper is available through the Bar's online library of CLE, as is the video of my talk (I think they get the slide show as well, but I'm not certain - in any event there were only a couple of cases added to the slide show from the paper).  Almost every presentation at that seminar would be of interest to readers of this blog with an interest in patent litigation, so check it out.