Netflix Drops WBD Bid, Paving Way For Paramount Deal

By Al Barbarino

Netflix Inc. ditched its effort to buy Warner Bros. Discovery on Thursday after WBD announced that it determined a competing bid from Paramount Skydance is the "superior proposal."

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DOJ, Apple Clash Over Discovery For Monopolization Case

By Tom Lotshaw

The U.S. Department of Justice pushed back against a plan Apple pitched for discovery disputes in a monopolization suit against the company, arguing the company has sought sensitive information and asked a federal judge to fix an "'emergency' of its own making."

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NCAA To Consider Penalties For Football Transfer Violations

By Ganesh Setty

An NCAA Division I oversight committee has proposed new penalties for schools that transfer student-athletes to their football team rosters without the student's giving proper notice during the NCAA's January transfer window, including a six-game coaching suspension.

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Vanguard Will Pay $29.5M To Settle Red States' ESG Suit

By Spencer Brewer

The Vanguard Group Inc. will pay $29.5 million to settle claims brought by several conservative states accusing it and other large asset managers of driving up coal prices by pressuring publicly traded energy companies to lower their output to meet carbon emission reduction goals.

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Antitrust Claims Over Oil Tubing Patents Saved By Fed. Circ.

By Theresa Schliep

The Federal Circuit on Thursday undid a Texas federal judge's conclusion that a company intended to defraud the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when it got a patent on coiled tubing, but also revived claims accusing it of using fraudulently obtained patents to get a monopoly.

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Delaware Judge Won't Reconsider Burford Arbitration Ruling

By Rose Krebs

A Delaware federal judge has denied German entity Financialright Claims GmbH's bid to reconsider his decision ordering arbitration of a dispute with a Burford Capital affiliate over an allegedly fraudulent arbitration pact, rejecting claims that the ruling was "premised on a clear error of law."

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Musk, OpenAI Spar Over AG OKs, Altman Firing, AI Safety

By Bryan Koenig

Elon Musk, OpenAI and Microsoft traded blows Wednesday in a series of California federal court briefs fighting over what a jury will see when the parties go to trial in late April on Musk's challenge to OpenAI's transition from the nonprofit structure he'd backed with $38 million in donations.  

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House Bill Would Cap FCC License Reviews At 180 Days

By Christopher Cole

A bipartisan U.S. House bill introduced Thursday would codify the Federal Communications Commission's standard 180-day limit on reviewing license applications, potentially speeding up merger reviews.

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DirecTV Urges Top FCC Officials To Nix Nexstar-Tegna Deal

By Christopher Cole

DirecTV went to the top ranks of the Federal Communications Commission in recent days to push against the proposed merger of TV station giants Nexstar and Tegna, calling it a clear threat to local media competition.

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BlueScope Turns $11B Bid Down But Still Open To Talks

By Al Barbarino

Australia's BlueScope Steel Ltd. on Thursday said a revised roughly AU$15 billion ($11 billion) takeover proposal from SGH Ltd. and Steel Dynamics Inc. does not adequately reflect the company's valuation, but it remains open to further discussions.

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Amazon Loses Bid To Halt £4B Class Actions Over 'Buy Boxes'

By Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Amazon lost its bid to stifle two major class action cases against it on Thursday, as the Court of Appeal rejected its attempts to challenge tribunal decisions that gave the green light for the £4 billion ($5.4) cases to proceed to trial.

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CMA Advocates Ban On Noncompetes For Low-Paid Workers

By Hanna Vioque

The U.K.'s competition watchdog has told the government that it should ban noncompete clauses for employees earning below a certain threshold, but stopped short of calling for a blanket ban.  

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$200M Antitrust Deal Can Shield Drugmakers In States' Claims

By Matthew Santoni

Sun Pharmaceutical and Taro Pharmaceuticals can use their $200 million settlement with the "end payors" for generic drugs in an alleged price-fixing scheme as a defense in a similar lawsuit brought by 47 states and territories, the Connecticut federal judge overseeing the case ruled Wednesday.

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LA Times Joins Ad Tech Antitrust Litigation Against Google

By Lauren Berg

The publisher of The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday threw its hat into multidistrict litigation targeting Google's advertising placement technology dominance, alleging that Google's monopolization forces publishers to sell ad space at depressed prices that boost the tech giant's profits while dramatically cutting revenue for publishers and Google's ad technology rivals.

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Judge Backs $19M Default Judgment In Amazon's Piracy Suit

By Ivan Moreno

A Texas federal judge has recommended a copyright default judgment of nearly $19 million against a man whom Amazon and other major studios accuse of running an illicit streaming operation that began with the sale of "jailbroken" Fire TV sticks to stream content for free.

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Amazon Loses Bid For 'Hot Tub' Hearing In Antitrust Suit

By Ben Adlin

A Washington federal judge on Thursday shot down Amazon.com Inc.'s push for a concurrent hearing with multiple expert witnesses in a proposed class action accusing the retail giant of artificially inflating consumer prices, ruling that what's known as a "hot tub" hearing is "not necessary at this time."

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Homebuyers Aim To Block 'Egregious' Deal In Related Case

By Celeste Bott

Homebuyers asked an Illinois federal judge to block an allegedly inadequate settlement attorneys in a related antitrust case reached with one of the real estate firms they're suing, saying allowing their claims to be released on the cheap would encourage "forum and judge shopping in class action litigation."

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Yardi Urges No More Discovery In Wash. Rent-Fixing Suit

By Grace Dixon

Yardi Systems Inc. asked a Washington federal court not to grant renters' bid for further discovery in their proposed antitrust class action over rent-setting algorithms, arguing that the renters haven't even identified what other materials they might still seek.

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Co. Says $1.3B Gov't Fire Retardant Deal Props Up Monopoly

By Ganesh Setty

A Texas-based fire retardant company is accusing the U.S. Forest Service of inking an anticompetitive contract with a competitor valued at more than $1.3 billion, telling the Federal Claims Court this week that the contract creates a "perpetual monopoly" at taxpayers' expense.

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4th Circ. Revives Secrets Charges Against Ex-Deloitte Workers

By Elliot Weld

The Fourth Circuit on Thursday revived the bulk of the charges against two former Deloitte workers accused of stealing the company's trade secrets, disagreeing with a lower court that dismissed the case because of the government's delay in bringing it.

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Ex-Joe Gibbs Racing Director Denies Trade Secret Theft

By Gina Kim

Joe Gibbs Racing's former competition director on Wednesday denied absconding with trade secrets on his way out the door and urged a North Carolina federal judge to reject the NASCAR giant's request to stop him from working for a rival, arguing this would "effectively exile me from this profession."

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Brief

Foreign Cos. Won't Be Roped Back Into Price-Fixing MDL

By Nadia Dreid

A Pennsylvania federal judge has said no thank you to changing his decision to dismiss two parent companies in Germany and China from a multidistrict litigation accusing them and others of working together to manipulate the price of two chemicals used to make polyurethane.

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Brief

Judge Pauses NCAA Tennis Prize Money Dispute

By Elaine Briseño

A North Carolina federal judge Thursday granted two tennis players a 60-day pause in their class action while they hash out a settlement with the NCAA over allegations that its rule prohibiting athletes from accepting prize money from professional events violates antitrust laws.

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Planning For M&A Complexity After New State 'Mini-HSR' Laws

After the recent enactment of California's mini-HSR law, and with Indiana poised to pass its own, requiring the submission of Hart-Scott-Rodino premerger notifications to state attorneys general, practitioners should expand their deal planning to include state-by-state reportability as more states adopt similar mandatory merger-notification requirements, say attorneys at McDermott.

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Series

Playing Piano Makes Me A Better Lawyer

Playing piano and practicing law share many parallels relating to managing complexity: Just as hearing an entire musical passage in my head allows me to reliably deliver the message, thinking about the audience's impression helps me create a legal narrative that keeps the reader engaged, says Michael Shepherd at Fish & Richardson.

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How Epstein Referred Clients To BigLaw Partners In His Orbit

By Aebra Coe

Billionaire and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein always had top lawyers in his orbit. He also had extensive and lasting relationships with several partners at BigLaw firms, files newly released by the Department of Justice show.

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Goldstein Placed Under Home Confinement Until Sentencing

By Jared Foretek

SCOTUSblog founder Thomas Goldstein was placed under home confinement by a Maryland federal judge until his sentencing, but will likely be able to keep his $3 million D.C. home after the jury that convicted him separately found there wasn't a clear nexus between the property and his mortgage fraud conviction.

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'One Way Or Another, ICE Will Comply,' Minn. Judge Vows

By Lauren Berg

The Minnesota federal court's chief judge who admonished U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for violating nearly 100 court orders concerning the Trump administration's immigration operations in the state vowed Thursday "to do whatever is required to protect the rule of law," including holding government officials in criminal contempt.

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IRS Broke Law 42K Times By Giving Info To ICE, Judge Says

By Anna Scott Farrell

The federal judge who stopped the Internal Revenue Service from sharing taxpayer addresses with immigration authorities said Thursday that a recent admission by the agency showed that it broke the law more than 42,000 times last summer when it disclosed addresses by relying on a computerized matching system.

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Calif. Atty Agrees To Discipline From State Bar Over AI Errors

By Hailey Konnath

A Los Angeles attorney has agreed to be disciplined for filing appellate briefs rife with artificial intelligence-hallucinated case law quotations, according to a stipulation approved Wednesday by the California State Bar Court, which found that he "recklessly and with gross negligence failed to perform legal services with competence."

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Reed Smith Says Atty Can't Expand Pay Bias Damages Period

By Grace Elletson

Reed Smith LLP is urging a New Jersey state court to rule that an attorney who claimed the firm unlawfully underpaid her cannot expand the time window for which she's seeking damages, arguing a legal doctrine used to revive continuing claims can't be used to collect back pay.

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Feds Seek To Toss DOJ Official's Suit Over Epstein-Talk Firing

By Lynn LaRowe

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked a D.C. federal court to ax a wrongful termination lawsuit brought by a former DOJ official who was fired after he was surreptitiously filmed talking about Jeffrey Epstein on what he thought was a date, saying district courts don't have jurisdiction and the matter belongs in front of the Merit Systems Protection Board.

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Atty Owns 'Sloppy' Incorrect Citations Before Texas Justices

By José Luis Martínez

A Houston attorney told a Texas appellate panel Thursday that incorrect case citations in his brief were "sloppy" and "embarrassing," taking responsibility for errors that included nonexistent cases and inaccurate quotations.

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Brief

Senate Judiciary Advances Illinois US Atty

By Nadia Dreid

The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the nomination of Gregory Gilmore to be U.S. attorney for the Central District of Illinois in a quick vote that passed without comment.

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