North America: Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration

In Voom HD Holdings LLC v. EchoStar Satellite L.L.C., No. 600292/08 (1st Dep’t Jan. 31, 2012), the First Department became the first New York state appellate court to adopt the preservation of evidence standard set forth in Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, 220 F.R.D. 212, 218 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).

The Court ordered specific performance of the renewal option on the terms of the standard form renewal in existence at the time of the dispute.

This paper, originally presented at the 2010 CCLA Solicitors Conference, reviewed particular factors that drafters must consider when including forum clauses in contracts as well as the tests the courts have used when jurisdiction has been disputed and how they had been changed by the Ontario Court of Appeal in the Van Breda decision.

In January, the Ontario Court of Appeal confirmed the existence of a new common law right of action for breach of privacy in Jones v. Tsige.

Following a two year investigation by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office ("AGO"), a local Massachusetts hospital has agreed to pay $775,000 to resolve allegations that it failed to protect the personal and confidential health information of more than 800,000 consumers.

What if the story of your life was written at birth- a "future diary" available for someone to read? The decoding of the human genome over a decade ago held the promise of defying our genetic destiny, but it also foreshadowed some significant ethical issues on the horizon.

Abraham Lincoln once famously said that "He who represents himself has a fool for a client." While this statement has been demonstrated to be true more often than not, what happens when...

People and businesses located outside of the United States have a powerful tool to discover information, located in the United States, that may assist them with foreign litigation.

efendants moving to dismiss amended complaints under Rule 9(b) often confront the issue of whether a plaintiff can leverage and cite to materials obtained in discovery in order to meet that rule's pleading standards.

A year after the uncertainty created in the Canadian corporate debt financing world by the Ontario Court of Appeal's pensions-friendly decision in the Indalex CCAA restructuring matter, the Quebec Superior Court, in April 2012, determined in a lengthy and well-reasoned decision that the key restructuring and pensions law principles underpinning Indalex do not apply in Quebec when considering the treatment of defined benefit amortization payment and deficit claims in a restructuring.

The Federal Court of Appeal ("FCA") upheld the judicial review decision of the Federal Court ("FC") in "Livaditis v. Canada Revenue Agency".

On February 24, 2012, the Tax Court of Canada ("TCC") rendered its decision in Morguard Corporation v. Her Majesty the Queen (2012 TCC 55 – PDF) on the issue of the taxation of break fees received in the context of a takeover bid pursuant to a "lock-up agreement".