Legal Best Practices Magazine
By Louis M. Ursini, III,
Esq.
Published: February / March 2008
It is no secret that the
current credit crisis is significantly affecting a
consumers’ ability to pay their debt. As government
regulations have increased the minimum monthly payment
required on revolving credit accounts, along with higher
variable interest rates and stiffening bankruptcy
regulations, consumers are faced with fewer
opportunities for relief.
By Brent C.J. Britton
Published: February / March 2008
In our capitalist economy,
management is expected to fiercely seize every lawful
opportunity to increase company valuation. Intellectual
Property (IP) law provides many such opportunities of
which the wise entrepreneur should be aware.
Hold That Bottom Line
The Big Ten of Business
By Neil R. Covert and H. Michelle Yang
Published: November 2007
Are you a business owner?
Like many in the Greater Tampa Bay Area, you probably
have a list of concerns about the health, wealth, and
sustainability of your business. As the principal or
owner, you are in a unique position of control, and in
turn, a far more vulnerable role – both financially and
legally – than any other individual within the company.
Without a clear, focused plan to manage what bumps in
the road may appear in the future, you could find
yourself in deep regret, or worse, financial ruin.
Planning ahead is essential to protecting the success of
the business you have worked so hard to build.
By Christopher Griffin
Because electronic
information has become increasingly important in today’s
business world, it has become equally important as
evidence in modern litigation. According to MIT’s Center
for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development, 50
percent of evidence in cases today is email, and U.S.
companies spend $4.6 billion annually to analyze those
emails. In addition, several courts have imposed severe
penalties on companies that failed to maintain or
produce electronic information in the course of
litigation discovery. In some of those cases they have
given juries an “adverse inference” instruction,
allowing the jurors to assume that unrecoverable emails
would negatively have impacted the defendant’s case.
And, in one such case, the court permitted this negative
inference despite the defense counsel’s repeated
directions to company employees not to delete any
electronic information, and requests to company IT
personnel to stop recycling backup tapes, finding that
those actions were insufficient because certain
electronic evidence still was not retained.
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