The scope of an arbitration agreement can be expanded by positions taken by the parties in arbitration proceedings.
Wells Fargo brought claims against WMR e-PIN and other respondents, alleging breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. The claims arose out of a software licensing agreement and other contracts which contained binding arbitration provisions.
Just Click No. I’ve written a decent amount about the adhesive nature of website terms of service and how it’s unseemly for contract law to pretend that people read and agree to them. Well, not everyone has to grin and bear it. If you have as much clout as the government, you might be able to wring out a few concessions as Bill Carleton reports in Amending Terms of Service: Pages from the Government’s Playbook.
[The Reading List — a regular feature of theContractsGuy — highlights blogs that are interesting enough that I check in regularly. Here’s a link to other Reading List posts.]
Business Law Post is a no-nonsense, accessible blog about business law issues. It’s published by Arina Shulga, a former Cleary Gottlieb associate and current solo practitioner in the Big Apple. Arina is also involved in a start-up that produces apps for children, a fact that I discovered from her excellent guest post Legal Considerations for Mobile App Developers on the Moms with Apps Blog, which of course I read regularly.
The word “or” can cause confusion in a contract that can be expensive to resolve when the assistance of lawyers and federal judges is required. Diligent drafters should be on the lookout for potential ambiguity in order to avoid unnecessary expense and litigation. Anderson v. Hess Corp. is a case in point.
The Andersons, along with the owners of several parcels of land that adjoin the Andersons’ land, were parties to an oil lease with Hess Corporation. The lease automatically renewed at the end of its term if Hess Corporation was then conducting “drilling or reworking operations.”
Here are a few recent articles from the Interwebs I found interesting. You might want to take a peek, also.
Ecuador Oil Contamination. Venkat Balasubramani tweeted a link to Reversal of Fortune, a detailed story in the New Yorker about a lawsuit against Texaco for environmental damage in Ecuador. The case dragged on for a couple of decades and resulted in an $18 billion verdict against Chevron (the successor in interest to Texaco). It’s clear that environmental damage was done, but a Chevron lawyer once said, “This is not about dirt in Ecuador. It is about a contract and how to interpret it.”
[The Reading List — a regular feature of theContractsGuy — highlights blogs that are interesting enough that I check in regularly. Here’s a link to other Reading List posts.]
A law school student asked me via Twitter recently whether it’s hard to maintain a blog and have a corporate law practice. The answer of course is that it’s very difficult, because there’s not time for nearly everything I want — and need — to do.
Finding time to blog regularly is tough for everyone. For a lawyer who has clients whose needs pretty much always trump a side project like a blog, the difficult often becomes impossible.
The United States Supreme Court reaffirmed its favor of arbitration yesterday in one of its first decisions of the year. In CompuCredit v. Greenwood, the high court once again reversed the Ninth Circuit in an arbitration case.
You might recall that the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit last April in its much discussed AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion decision. In that case the Supreme Court overturned California’s Discover Bank rule, which had rendered class arbitration waivers in consumer adhesion contracts all but unenforceable in California. AT&T Mobility effectively gives companies a way to opt out of class arbitrations altogether, albeit — unless the ruling is broadened in future cases — at the cost of providing individual consumers a more effective remedy in arbitration than they would likely have via class action. See my discussion of the opinion in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion: Is Class Arbitration Dead?
Whack-A-Mole. Cockroaches. Electronic confidential information. What’s the common thread? They’re all difficult to destroy. The moles of the carnival game relentlessly pop up in new places. Cockroaches could survive a nuclear attack. And it would be difficult — potentially impossible — to completely destroy electronic confidential information as is required under many confidentiality agreements.
Confidentiality agreements often require the party that has an obligation to protect the confidential information (the receiving party) to either return or destroy the information at the end of the agreement. Here’s a typical provision, which I borrowed from the Iowa State University Extension website:
Two cases decided by the Eighth Circuit in the latter half of 2011, Viasystems and KV Pharmaceutical, serve as a reminder that activities undertaken while negotiating and performing contracts can have a bearing on personal jurisdiction issues if the contracts are litigated.
In Viasystems, a corporation based in Missouri sued a foreign supplier for breach of contract, among other things. Viasystems sued in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and the supplier moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. The trial court dismissed the case, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed on appeal.
Here are a few of the pieces from the social web I enjoyed reading recently. I shamelessly stole the idea from Bradley B. Clark, who writes the Texas Law Blog. I don’t know who he lifted the idea from….
There’s always something interesting going on at Ken Adams’s The Koncise Drafter for folks who are into contract language. My favorite discussion this week was Excluding Consequential Damages in a Confidentiality Agreement. I usually use the word discussion when I talk about Ken’s blog, because his readers offer up thoughtful, stimulating comments to almost every post. If you’re reading the blog in an RSS reader, you’re missing out on a lot of the good stuff. [continue reading…]
