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No blog post today. Just praying for everyone affected by the hurricane and flooding. We’ll be back next week.

A senior lawyer once said to me that “practicing law would be great, if it wasn’t for the clients.” It’s a joke, of course. Lawyers couldn’t practice law without clients, and the clients pay the bills. So we definitely appreciate our clients. But there’s no question that practicing law would be easier if we didn’t have to worry about the bad decisions our clients sometimes make. Take social media, for example. In Part 1 of this series, I talked about lawyers using social media to do opposition research, i.e. to dig up dirt on the opposing party. Ethically, that’s generally […]

Can a lawyer view an opposing party’s publicly available social media profile and posts?

Sleep deprivation is a widely acknowledged but widely ignored problem in the legal profession. But what if we looked at sleep more like professional athletes do?

Insurance agencies often use non-competes to protect their goodwill, but are the non-competes enforceable? And can the company get an injunction?

Bad emails. Trial lawyers love them and hate them. When your client sends them, there’s nothing worse. When the person you’re suing sends them, there’s nothing better. Scratch that. There is one thing better: when the person you’re suing changes his story after you confront him with bad emails he didn’t know you had. Let’s consider a hypothetical. Paula Payne Windows v. Dawn Davis Dawn Davis was a salesperson for Paula Payne Windows, a wholesaler that supplies windows to builders in the construction industry. Paula Payne maintained a Master Customer List containing detailed information about all of its customers. Dawn […]

Horizon v. Acadia finds expert’s assumptions too speculative to support lost profits verdict Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be damages experts in Texas. That’s the refrain CPAs may feel like singing after the Texas Supreme Court recently raised the bar for proving lost profits damages in trade secrets lawsuits—again. It started in 2016 with Southwest Energy v. Berry-Helfand, where the damages expert calculated lost profits for misappropriation of oilfield trade secrets by assuming a flat reasonable royalty rate of 3%, which was consistent with industry standards. As I reported here, the Texas Supreme Court said this opinion […]

Will it become routine for defendants in Texas trade secrets lawsuits to file motions to dismiss under the TCPA?

In Elite Auto Body, the Austin Court of Appeals held that the Texas anti-SLAPP statute applies to ordinary trade secrets lawsuits.

Recent case holds that the Texas anti-SLAPP statute applies to a company’s claim that a former employee communicated confidential information and trade secrets to a competitor.