Mass Law Blog
Intellectual property and business litigation, Massachusetts and nationallyWritten by humans
Lee Gesmer’s Mass Law Blog began in 2005, and contains almost 600 posts. The site initially focused on Massachusetts law, but today it follows business and intellectual property law nation-wide. The site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm represents startup and established companies in the areas of litigation, transactions (including financings, mergers and acquisitions), IP rights, taxation, employment law, standards consortia, business counseling and open source development projects and foundations. You can find a summary of the firm’s services here. To learn how Gesmer Updegrove can help you, contact: Lee Gesmer
Wage-Fixing, No-Poaching and Criminal Antitrust
When I was a newbie lawyer just out of law school I worked at a Washington D.C. “BigLaw” firm that concentrated on antitrust law. We represented a client in a criminal antitrust case that involved bid rigging in the highway and airport paving industry. It turns out that bid rigging was rampant in the U.S. southeast, leading to many indictments, guilty pleas and convictions.You can read about it in this 1982 court decision. What is bid rigging? Typically a state highway or transportation...
NFTs – An Existential Crisis for Copyright Lawyers
Many people who’ve lived with the traditional rules of intellectual property during their professional lives are struggling with non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs”. I'm one, and it’s a bit of an existential crisis for us. My advice - relax and repeat after me: “this has nothing to do with copyright law.” The existence of NFTs came to the attention of many people after Christie's sold Beeple’s Everydays: the First 5000 Days - a collage of 5000 digital art images - for $69 million in early 2021. One...
Massachusetts Garden Leave – Three Years Later Questions Still Unanswered
When Massachusetts passed its complex and restrictive noncompete law in 2018 (the “Massachusetts Noncompete Act” or the “Act”) it was predictable that the use of noncompete agreements in the state would decline. See A New Era In Massachusetts Noncompete Law. And, in fact, until now there have been no reported cases that involve the Act. Anecdotally, with few exceptions employers have stopped asking employees to enter into noncompete agreements. It’s just too darn complicated. As I summarized...
Online Contracts – When Is the Last Time You Read the Terms and Conditions?
When you sign up for an online service do you read the terms and conditions? Few people do, not even the lawyers that are hired to write these things. While online agreements are ridiculed for their length and complexity they are important to the online service companies - companies like Uber, Airbnb and countless others that have to deal with the risk of customer lawsuits. Companies use online agreements to protect themselves in a variety of ways - against jury trials (often by requiring...
This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find a summary of our services here. To learn how GU can help you, contact:
Lee Gesmer