Minnesota Lawyer

There has been an uptick in class actions over employment screening practices that use consumer reports as grounds for making decisions about job applicants or employees.

LexisNexis and Martindale-Hubbell recently conducted a survey of 415 senior personnel (managing partners, lawyers, marketing directors and other director positions) at law firms worldwide to see if the firms sought out client feedback.

Read the December 2011 edition of our quarterly In-House Counsel special section.

In November, Barnes & Thornburg hosted Teresa Stanek Rea, deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in Minneapolis to discuss the impact of the America Invents Act (AIA), the most significant reform of the U.S. patent system in nearly six decades.

Here’s a word of caution for lawyers who use Twitter professionally: If you part ways with your firm, your ex-employer may get custody of your tweets.

The vast majority of publicly accessible properties — including hotels, stores, banks, movie theaters, doctors’ offices and barbershops — will be affected by new accessibility rules under the Americans With Disabilities Act governing public accommodations.

Attorney Eric Maassen plans to use a lot fewer paper clips and Post-its in the near future. The page markers once played a large role in distinguishing relevant information found in documents during case discovery, he said. But with the rise of e-discovery and new technology that requires fewer people poring over documents, Maassen, a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP in Milwaukee, soon might be able to give his eyes and office supplies a rest.

After the widespread failures associated with the Bernard Madoff scandal, Congress hastily passed the Dodd-Frank Act and empowered the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue rules enforcing certain provisions, including the whistle-blower bounty provision. In effect, Congress has deputized employees of publicly traded companies to police their employers’ conduct, offering handsome compensation to those who do so effectively.

Almost two years have passed since Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act, lowering the criteria to establish disability status in response to cramped judicial interpretations of the ADA.

The 2011 Litigation Trends Survey reveals an interesting and ongoing trend: Companies headquartered in the Midwest continue to be more aggressive in filing lawsuits than companies headquartered anywhere else in the country