SAN DIEGO — An Imperial Beach woman filed a federal lawsuit last Friday against Paramount Pictures, claiming several ideas used in the popular 1997 film „Titanic“ were stolen from a novel she had written years earlier.
„Titanic“ is currently the second largest grossing film of all time, with more than $2 billion in worldwide revenue. The film is being re-released in 3-D in theaters April 4. Weiterlesen
How do you move off dead center? That was a question posed by my colleague Mary Jones in a recent guest blog post. She gave several concrete steps in answer to her own question. This question was further explored in the January issue of the Compliance Week magazine which began a six-part “Anti-Corruption Illustrated” series by Carol Switzer, President of the Open Compliance and Ethics Group (OCEG). OCEG is an organization which “develops standards and guidance to help organizations achieve Principled Performance”; that is, “the reliable achievement of objectives while addressing uncertainty and acting with integrity.” OCEG’s Illustrated Series is a teaching method developed to visually represent how to set up processes and procedures in various areas and disciplines. This Anti-Corruption Illustrated Series is a very useful tool for the compliance practitioner to use in explaining the components of an effective compliance program. Weiterlesen
The United States Sentencing Commission’s Final Quarterly Data Report for fiscal year 2011 is now available on the Commission’s website. The report includes an extensive set of tables and charts presenting fiscal year quarterly data on cases in which the offender was sentenced during fiscal year 2011. The report also provides an analysis of sentencing trends over five years for several key sentencing practices.
View the Final FY11 Quarterly Sentencing Update.
A federal appeals court in California rejected a settlement of AOL e-mail privacy claims that would have distributed nothing to the 66 million plaintiffs but $110,000 to a collection of charities including one affiliated with the trial judge’s husband.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, saying the “specter of judges” distributing the spoils from a lawsuit “may create the appearance of impropriety,” threw out the settlement negotiated by Richard Kellner of Kabatack Brown Kellner and several other firms. Among other problems, the settlement gave two-thirds of the money to charities in Kellner’s hometown of Los Angeles and $25,000 of it was targeted for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, whose directors included the husband of U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder, who approved the settlement. AmLaw reported the decision here.
A former pro wrestler from Jeffersonville, Ind., is suing an Evansville-based promoter and an opponent from Louisville over a match in which he suffered a kick to the groin.
In a lawsuit filed Monday in Clark Circuit Court in Indiana, John Levi Miller accused his opponent, Clinton Woosley, known as Guido Andretti in the ring, of rupturing his right testicle last June during a match that was supposed to have a prearranged outcome.
Miller’s suit seeks a jury trial, legal fees and unspecified compensation for medical expenses related to the surgery and for medical expenses he may incur from health consequences of his injury, including erectile dysfunction, loss of testosterone, loss of sex drive and osteoporosis. His lawyer says he has no health insurance and owes more than $20,000 in medical bills. Weiterlesen
Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the resolution of an enforcement action under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) involving the Tulsa based company, BizJet. The company is in the business of providing aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul services (MRO) to customers in the US and internationally. BizJet ran into FCPA trouble regarding its Latin American operations, specifically in the countries of Mexico and Panama. BizJet employees and executives were involved in multi-year running bribery scheme which paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for these MRO contracts. These payments were discussed at the highest levels of the company, including the Board of Directors, and occurred from 2004 until 2010. Weiterlesen
A New Jersey man who got so drunk playing beer pong at a Greenwich Village pub that he thought walking across a busy highway was a good idea cannot sue the bar over his injuries, a judge has ruled.
In a decision made public yesterday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lucy Billings threw out Alan Berger’s lawsuit against Wicked Willy’s on Bleecker Street, finding he’d signed up for the fast-paced beer-drinking game of his own free will.
“Despite the game tables, cups and alcohol [that the] defendant bar made available to plaintiff and other bar patrons without serving the alcohol or monitoring its consumption, plaintiff voluntarily engaged in the drinking game” and “consumed alcohol to the point of diminished capacity,” Billings wrote. Weiterlesen
Detroit— A White Lake woman waged a new fight against high gas prices Friday.
Victoria Jean Church-Dellinger filed a $5 million class-action suit in federal court against Ally Financial Inc. for keeping the half a tank’s worth of gas in her 2008 Pontiac G6 when it was repossessed.
„It’s the same as if you left your jacket in there and they didn’t return it to you,“ Brian Parker, her Bingham Farms attorney, said in an interview. „You can’t take someone’s coat or fuzzy dice, and you have to return the gas.“
Church-Dellinger, 43, wants more than $5 million, which represents three times the fair market value of all gasoline taken from Michigan residents by the Detroit-based automotive financial services company over the last six years, according to the suit. She also wants the Detroit-based auto lender, which is majority-owned by the U.S. government, to return all gasoline seized during that time or pay fair market value. Weiterlesen
Compliance practitioners are
continually tasked with moving a company’s culture of compliance forward. However, the day-to-day work is sometimes too granular to see results. In an article in the January-February issue of the Harvard Business Review, entitled “Creating Sustainable Performance”, authors Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath explore some different techniques that managers can use to “help employees thrive at work.”
They note that even in a down economy, thriving employees out produce non-thriving employees. The authors defined ‘thriving’ as employees who are not only “satisfied and productive but also engaged in creating the future” for their organization. I thought about these concepts within the context of promoting a culture of compliance within your organization.
BOSTON (AP) — A former student at a Roman Catholic college has filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming administrators didn’t do enough to help her when she complained that her roommate was having too much sex in their dorm room.
Lindsay Blankmeyer said in a federal lawsuit that she suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder before she enrolled at Stonehill College, but was driven into a suicidal depression after school officials wouldn’t give her reasonable housing alternatives to get her away from her roommate at the school in Easton, Mass.
Blankmeyer said her roommate had sex with her boyfriend while she was trying to sleep just feet away and also participated in „sexually inappropriate video chatting“ while Blankmeyer was in the dorm room. Weiterlesen
