Every week, lawyers add sharp, timely commentary to the Library at LexBlog, covering the issues shaping their practices and industries. Top 10 in Law highlights the pieces that stood out and drew readers in.
Honeywell Aerospace Hit with Securities Suit Following FCA Cybersecurity Settlement
The D&O Diary has spent months tracking DOJ’s widening use of the False Claims Act, and here is the consequence it kept flagging. Honeywell Aerospace disclosed an FCA settlement in September over alleged cybersecurity compliance failures on a DOD contract; investors say that disclosure was the first they heard of the investigation behind it. The securities class action followed. Abrams traces how an FCA matter turns into a disclosure case.
Not Clearly Out, So Still In: Fifth Circuit Revives Railroad Conductor’s ADA Claim Through Class Action Tolling
A conductor lost his job in 2013 over a color vision test and did not file his EEOC charge until 2020. The Fifth Circuit revived the claim anyway: under American Pipe, tolling runs until a class definition unambiguously excludes you, and a narrower definition that turned on fine distinctions in the railroad’s own medical rules did not. Judge Smith borrowed the Eighth Circuit’s line about such wording — “fodder for lawyers and quicksand for laymen.”
Can You Tell Your Boss to F* Off and Keep Your Job? The Ontario Court of Appeal Weighs In
As lawyers like to say, it depends. Threatening to punch him immediately afterward does not help. Adams works through the Ontario Court of Appeal’s affirmance in Warkentin, where a man who sold his business and stayed on as an employee shared his views of the new ownership by way of F-bombs, a threat of assault, and a memorable entry in the company database.
Trick or Claim? What a Pumpkin Patent Teaches Us About Method Claims
U.S. Patent No. 4,296,659, “Jack-O-Lantern Forming Method,” issued four days before Halloween in 1981. It is a cookie cutter for pumpkins, with more percussion. The die gets lovingly described in the specification, but Claim 1 claims the method rather than the device — which, as Partow-Navid puts it, is the hill this patent chose to die on. It has since expired, so punch away.
What $2.1 Billion Doesn’t Tell You
Weil posted $2.1 billion in revenue and more than $5.6 million per equity partner last year, and is now winding down. Morse, who was chief marketing officer at McGlinchey Stafford when it voted to dissolve in January, argues those figures are a good rearview mirror and nothing more — strong ones mostly buy a firm permission to postpone the harder conversation. She splits that conversation in two, exposure versus readiness, and walks ten dimensions with a paired question for each. Several of them sting: does more than 30% of revenue come from your ten largest clients, and have you asked any of them how they plan to buy legal services in two years?
Lexis Protégé Is Labeling Your Downloads “AI-Generated”… Even the Ones You Typed Yourself
Lambert opened a Word file exported from Protégé, checked Advanced Properties out of old law librarian habit, and found five custom fields he had never seen. Lexis is stamping exports as “AI-Generated,” naming itself as the provider, setting human review status to “Unknown,” and citing Article 50 of the EU AI Act — on documents you typed yourself. No notice on screen, and no setting in the download dialog.
Owner Plausibly Alleged Seattle’s Rental Regulations Are Penn Central And Physical Takings
GRE put roughly $39 million into a 254-unit low-income building in downtown Seattle, then argued that the combined weight of the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, the Roommate Ordinance, the winter eviction ban and the COVID moratorium left the property functionally valueless on an income approach. The trial court dismissed on the pleadings. The Washington Court of Appeals reversed, letting both the Penn Central and physical takings theories proceed.
Buried Alive? ERISA Claims Exhaustion Isn’t Necessarily Dead After Bolton
The en banc Eleventh Circuit overruled Mason, ending its run as the only circuit to require exhaustion of ERISA fiduciary breach claims and reviving an ESOP class action dismissed on that ground alone. The early headlines call exhaustion dead there. Kohn and DeMatties say that overstates it: Bolton expressly declined to disturb the precedent requiring exhaustion where a claim turns on plan terms, and that line is one sponsors can draft toward.
Fifth Circuit Revives Meta Pixel Privacy Class Action, Expanding Litigation Risk for Website Data
In Rand v. Eyemart Express, the Fifth Circuit held that customers’ browsing, purchasing and appointment-scheduling activity plausibly counted as individually identifiable health information, and that they plausibly alleged the retailer shared it with Meta through the Pixel. It is a pleading-stage ruling, but it hands the plaintiffs’ bar fresh authority for every site offering health-related products or services.
Dude, Where’s My Misrepresentation? Ninth Circuit Overturns Class Certification Against Tesla
The district court certified a class on the reasoning that Tesla’s marketing was pervasive enough to make exposure to its full self-driving hardware claims highly likely. The Ninth Circuit called that legally erroneous and vacated: a website is not a product label, and nothing showed every class member actually visited the page. Rees reads Losavio as a usable route past California’s classwide exposure presumption.
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