Beginning today, I'll be available to handle Expedited Commercial Cases for the American Arbitration Association.

As the AAA explains:

AAA offers fast, convenient online claim filing through our AAA WebFile service. In addition to filing claims, clients can make payments, perform online case management, access rules and procedures, electronically transfer documents, select Neutrals, use a case-customized message board and check the status of their case.

Click here for the WebFile page and here for a short slide presentation that walks you through the WebFile service features. 

The AAA Commercial Expedited Procedural Rules are here. 

Under the Expedited Commercial rules, the hearing takes place within thirty (30) days of the appointment of the arbitrator; the hearing will ordinarily not exceed a single day; the arbitrator's one-day hearing fee is $1,050; and, the arbitrator is required to render a decision within fourteen (14) days of the hearing.  What better way to end the year than by resolving those small pesky IP disputes with speed and ease.

If you'd like to resolve your dispute entirely online, see the AAA's Online Arbitration procedures here.

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From the Smart Woman Guide Blog, one of the best ways to feel grateful this holiday season and to express our recognition of our many blessings.  

(pictured, Sheila Ansah Adjei looking for a Kiva micro-loan)

Together We Are Stronger: The Value of Cooperation in Business

Cooperation is a SmartWoman Principle. I honestly believe that together, we are stronger. To highlight this point, I want to showcase two opportunities you have today to use the strength of cooperation to your advantage in your business.

Kiva and Microlending

There are many ways to show gratitude, foster solidarity, and raise awareness. These activities strengthen your ability to persevere in your business, reach out to others for help, and have your business noticed. They build your character as an entrepreneur and character is how you will ultimately succeed.

Every day on my Twitter background, I have been featuring a global female entrepreneur who is soliciting to receive a microloan through Kiva. Within hours, these entrepreneurs have become fully funded. Hours! Kiva provides the opportunity for farmers, retailers, manufacturers and more worldwide to feed their cattle, buy more inventory, and create new jobs. These women and their partners are pulling others out of poverty, creating self-sustaining economic systems and living “The Dream”.

Participating in microlending plugs you in to a global community of support and promise. It shows you what’s possible. It lights the fire of passion and purpose and spurs you on to do whatever you have to do to be successful in your meaningful work. An entrepreneur with vision, drive, and purpose is unstoppable. Sharing and cooperation through Kiva (or any other of the many microlending organizations) is a way to become that type of entrepreneur.

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An ounce of prevention . . . . with thanks to Patent Baristas for the following:

Book Review Monday: Intellectual Property Culture

cul·ture (n.) the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary Online).

The book “Intellectual Property Culture: Strategies to Foster Successful Patent and Trade Secret Practices in Everyday Business” by Eric Dobrusin and Ronald Krasnow is. . . . not just about the management of intellectual property assets, it is about creating a culture within an organization that recognizes that intellectual property is essential to the very livelihood of the business and knowing how to proactively protect IP assets.

  The guiding principal is that any organization that wishes to survive in the knowledge economy must develop an IP culture:

To thrive in the knowledge economy, organizations must cultivate attitudes and behaviors that recognize IP, respect IP, and trade upon the value of IP.  This needs to be done organically, within each individual organization, and to meet the specific needs and characteristics of each such organization.

The trick, of course, is to develop a “healthy IP culture.”

For full review, click here.

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Jaw dropping from Techdirt:

RIAA Agrees To Settlement, Then Asks For Twice As Much

from the anything-they-can-get-away-with dept

Ray Beckermann is, once again, highlighting some highly questionable activities by the RIAA, noting that after getting defendants to agree to a settlement amount, the RIAA sometimes immediately asks for double the agreed upon amount, and submits that proposal to the court. It's unclear how widely this is happening, but at least in one case, it's good to hear that a judge has prevented the RIAA from getting away with this practice by denying the agreement, noting the different sum than the one agreed to by the parties:

Judge Nancy Gertner: ELECTRONIC ORDER entered re Stipulation To Judgment and Permanent Injunction filed by All Plaintiffs as to defendant LaShaana Straw. "The parties' Stipulation to Judgment is DENIED. Plaintiffs request that the Court approve a Stipulation requiring the Defendant to pay $10,700, yet state in their Response that they have agreed to accept half that amount, $5,350, in full satisfaction of the monetary portion of the proposed judgment. The Plaintiffs do not provide any reason for this highly unusual arrangement, and the Court will not approve a stipulation which fails reflect the actual terms of the agreement.

Click here to read on.

image from PickYourTarget.com

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It's official!  I've joined the faculty of Solo Practice University™

Huh?

I don't see that University in any tier of the U.S. News and World Report's Law School Rankings!  And if it's not ranked for goodness sakes, does it even exist?

Yes, Virginia, a school for legal practitioners does exist "as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy."

O.K.,Solo Practice University™ is not Santa Claus but it comes pretty darn close.

Solo Practice University™ is a revolutionary new web-based educational community that picks up where your legal education left off.

Learn from some of the most progressive lawyers, marketing pros, technology consultants and legal business giants how to:

* Plan, build and grow your private practice
* Differentiate yourself from the competition
* Attract and engage new clients more easily

… and much more. They just can’t teach you that in law school.

Are your clients peppering you with questions you can't answer about their rights and remedies in Cyberspace?  Then it is Christmas, Hannukah and Kawanza all rolled up into one when SPU Professor Brett Trout is teaching a course on intellectual property in cyberspace.

Need to transform your marketing strategy in these troubled economic times?  You can learn  not just how to blog your way into your desired market, but how to leverage what you love into how much you make from Blawgfather and SPU Professor Grant Griffiths.

Wondering whether to put rocket fuel into your networking vehicle by adding online social media?  You couldn't find a better teacher than SPU Professor Toby Bloomberg who has over 15-years of traditional strategic marketing experience and four years with social media through her company Bloomberg Marketing/Diva Marketing.

Whether your presence in Cyberspace is solo or in connection with a group practice, let SPU Professor Stephanie L. Kimbo help you hang out your virtual shingle. 

Don't yet know your way around the courtroom?  Thinking of adding criminal defense to your practice as a growth industry in troubled economic times?  Need to ask questions of a seasoned trial attorney that would make you feel inadequate to ask of your supervising attorney in the PD's office?  There's no better winter holiday gift than SPU Professor Scott Greenfield's semester-long course “The Practice of Criminal Defense - The Road to Perdition.”

Still waiting to take that first deposition?  Taking your 20th and can't stop worrying that the Court Reporter thinks you're just a tiny bit pathetic?  Don't know how to deal with obstreperous opposing counsel?  Afraid to run a line of killer cross-examination to re-position your case for summary judgment or settlement?  Wish you'd gotten the expert to admit that he'd consider the moon to be green cheese if his attorney had told him to assume it? (yes my partner did). 

Then you'll want to sign up for my Deposition Skills course based upon the NITA techniques I've taught for more than a dozen years and my own OJT during a 25-year commercial legal practice.

Let your real legal education begin at Solo Practice University™

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Students Dropping Out Of School To Pay RIAA Settlement Fees?

from the educational-campaign,-huh? dept

You may recall a couple years ago that an RIAA representative suggested that an MIT student should drop out of school and get a job in order to pay the fine it was demanding she pay for sharing some music. Now, according to the associate dean of student development at the University of Wisconsin, some students are doing exactly that: "Some students have had to drop out of school in order to pay for their legal fees." No examples or proof is given, so I'm wondering if this is just a throw-away line.

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Heddy Lamar invented wireless tech?  Well . . . . it's not quite what happened, but not too far from the truth according to Duncan Bucknell's IP Think Tank Blawg Review #185.  If that doesn't send my Hollywood lawyer friends over to Duncan's pad for a read I don't know what would.

Next week’s Blawg Review will be hosted at Res Ipsa Blog. 

Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.

If you wish, send me a tiny url of posts you think are blawg review-worthy to @vpynchon on your Twitter network.

$#@^%& (that's husband cursing Twitter in background)

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TIMES ARE ALL PACIFIC STANDARD TIME:  WEB CASTS ARE ALL FREE

Join BrightTALK for the Intellectual Property Summit here!

IP litigation in China
  1:00 am
  Presenting Moderator: Peter Ollier, Asia editor, Managing IP

Are Google Adwords Trademarks?
   7:00 am
   Presenting Jason M. Drangel, Partner, Epstein Drangel

Winners and Losers in the Patent War
  8:00 am
Presenting Patrick J. Flinn, Partner, Alston & Bird LLP

Bilski: the impact on US patentees

   9:00 am
  Presenting Moderator - Eileen McDermott, Americas Editor, Managing IP

Patents : Part IV - Business Methods

  11:00 am
  Presenting Thad Gabara, Patent Agent and Inventor

Negotiating a Settlement in IP Litigation

   12:00 pm
   Presenting Victoria Pynchon, Judicate West, CPR, Settle It Now, IP ADR Blog

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From our own Hon. Margaret Morrow (head of the U.S. District Court's Settlement Officer Panel here) a reasoned and lively opinion on the intersection between life and video games here - E.S.S. ENTERTAINMENT 2000, INC. v.   ROCK STAR VIDEOS, INC.

The San Andreas Game is not complementary to the Play Pen; video games and strip clubs do not go together like a horse and carriage or, perish the thought, love and marriage.

Nothing indicates that the buying public would reasonably have believed that ESS produced the video game or, for that matter, that Rockstar operated a strip club. A player can enter the virtual strip club in Los Santos, but ESS has provided no evidence that the setting is anything but generic.

It also seems far-fetched that someone playing San Andreas would think ESS had provided whatever expertise, support, or unique strip-club knowledge it possesses to the production of the game.

After all, the Game does not revolve around running or patronizing a strip club. Whatever one can do at the Pig Pen seems quite incidental to the overall story of the Game.

A reasonable consumer would not think a company that owns one strip club in East Los Angeles, which is not well known to the public at large, also produces a technologically sophisticated video game like San Andreas.

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