Wyndham Worldwide Corp. has agreed to settle FTC claims that it violated the FTC Act by failing to maintain reasonable and appropriate data security for consumers' sensitive personal information. The settlement agreement requires Wyndham to establi

The FTC and the Pennsylvania Attorney General will file an action in federal district court on December 9, seeking to block Penn State Hershey Medical Center's proposed merger with PinnacleHealth System, the FTC announced today.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has overturned a district court decision granting Harley-Davidson Credit Corp. a $108,000 deficiency judgment against the guarantor of a defaulted loan secured by an aircraft. In accordance with the Nev

At a scheduled mark-up hearing, the House Financial Services Committee was set to consider two banking-related bills that would establish a national data security and breach notification standard for all businesses, and significantly increase the "

For a second time, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether its decisions that interpret the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment permit the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT Austin) consideration of race in a portion of its admissions decisions. The arguments were highly charged, eliciting some provocative statements by Justice [...]

By Georgia D. Koutouzos, J.D. A truck driver working as an independent contractor for an interstate trucking firm was an “employee” of the trucking company, thus triggering an exclusion in the company’s commercial motor vehicle insurance policy that barred coverage for bodily injury to the insured’s employees, the Eleventh Circuit ruled in an unpublished decision. Although [...]

The FDA released a draft guidance on the agency's position regarding best practices for communication between investigational new drug application (IND) sponsors and the FDA during drug development. The draft guidance is designed to help sponsors c

The issue of whether a government contractor's Medicaid reimbursement claims are "legally false" if payment conditions were not clearly specified will be taken up by the Supreme Court after a split in opinion among the First and Seventh Circuit Court

A products liability case filed by a patient who suffered injuries allegedly related to bone cement manufactured by DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc. (DePuy) was largely dismantled by an Ohio district court, although the claims for defective manufacturing and

Section 2001 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) (P.L. 111-148) provides states with the opportunity to expand the Medicaid, which will be initially funded by the federal government until states gradually take on a higher share of

The Senate on December 3 approved by a margin of 52-47 a budget reconciliation bill, the Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Bill of 2015 (HR 3762), which repeals portions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) (

A falling tree that killed two individuals and injured another constituted only one "occurrence" under a municipal housing authority's insurance policy, a federal court in Kentucky determined, holding that the insurer's liability for an under

The fact that the tractor and trailer components of a semi-tractor/tanker trailer combination had been temporarily unhooked for purposes of repairing a leaky valve on the trailer did not defeat coverage under the "Who Is An Insured" clause in a c

A patent owned by Sonix Technology Co., Ltd., which claimed a method for producing visually negligible dot patterns, or "graphical indicators," was invalid as indefinite, the federal district court in Chicago has held, because the patent failed t

In a patent infringement suit that Exergen Corp. brought against Kaz USA, an individual examination of 16 patent claims involving a forehead thermometer showed that four of the claims were patentably indistinct from claims that were previously found

Equipment importer Harbor Freight Tools, Inc., is subject to a $1 million civil penalty under a consent order with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for failing to issue a timely recall of more than 800,000 after-market trail

A new 5-Star Safety Ratings system that will, for the first time, include the assessment of crash-avoidance and advanced technologies as well as pedestrian protection has been proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Th

In a case of first impression, a district court in Tennessee held that Dodd-Frank's anti-retaliation provision only protects whistleblowers who report misconduct to the SEC. Finding the Fifth Circuit's reasoning in Asadi more persuasive than th

The Second Circuit overturned the conviction of a former securities broker for TARP and securities fraud. The broker, who has since been barred from the securities industry, got in trouble for lying about the prices his firm paid and charged for se