Reuters Legal

After 15 years of litigation, a copyright law battle between software support company Rimini Street and tech giant Oracle is headed back to a U.S. appeals court, as Rimini fights to overturn $58 million in legal fees awarded to Oracle in the case in September.   Rimini's lawyers at Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in their opening brief this week asked the 9th Circuit to reject the fee award as unjustified.   A federal judge in Nevada awarded the fees to Oracle last year after finding it had substantially prevailed on its copyright infringement claims against Las Vegas-based Rimini, which provided technical support for Oracle enterprise software clients starting in 2008.   Mike Scarcella, David Thomas and Blake Brittain have more: https://reut.rs/3FrAoJQ

Donald Trump took the fight over his attempt to restrict automatic U.S. birthright citizenship to the Supreme Court as the Republican president's administration asked the justices to narrow a judicial block imposed on this key element of his hardline approach toward immigration.   The Justice Department made the request challenging the scope of three nationwide injunctions issued against Trump's order by federal courts in Washington state, Massachusetts and Maryland.   The administration said the injunctions should be scaled back from applying universally and limited to just the plaintiffs that brought the cases and are ‘actually within the courts' power.’   Read more: https://reut.rs/4bPsaaq  

Harvard Law School posted the highest first-time bar pass rate in 2024, data from the American Bar Association shows, as exam results trended up nationwide.   All but 13 of the 608 Harvard law grads who took the attorney licensing exam for the first time last year were successful, for a pass rate of 97.86%.   The ABA on March 12 released a trove of bar exam data detailing national results and figures for the 197 individual U.S. law schools it accredits.   Those figures show that nearly 83% of juris doctor graduates from ABA-accredited law schools who took the bar for the first time passed — up more than three percentage points over the 79% first-time pass rate in 2023. It’s the highest national first-time pass rate since 2020, when 84% of takers passed.   Karen Sloan has more: https://reut.rs/4hsgbkh

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered six U.S. agencies to reinstate thousands of recently-hired employees who were fired as part of President Donald Trump's purge of the federal workforce. Alsup ruled that OPM, the human resources department for federal agencies, has no power to order firings, and there was evidence that it had improperly directed the termination of workers at six agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Treasury Department.   Subscribe to the Afternoon Docket here: reut.rs/3XzNBq2 Read the full story to find out more ➡️ https://reut.rs/41LUhCL

News Corp has been sued by Google search engine rival Brave Software, which seeks to forestall a lawsuit by Rupert Murdoch's company for when readers are directed to copyrighted articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. In a March 12 night complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, Brave said News Corp sent a cease-and-desist letter threatening litigation and demanding compensation for the alleged misappropriation of copyrighted articles by ‘scraping’ its websites and indexing their content. Brave countered that it is ‘fair use’ to index website content, ‘which all search engine operators must do to exist.’ Read more: https://reut.rs/3FumJ4H

A group of Democratic state attorneys general filed a lawsuit seeking to block Republican U.S. President Donald Trump's administration from dismantling the U.S. Department of Education and halt it from laying off nearly half of its staff. Attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia filed the lawsuit in federal court in Boston after the Education Department on March 11 announced plans to lay off more than 1,300 of its employees as part of the agency's ‘final mission.’ Trump has vowed to eliminate the department, which oversees $1.6 trillion in college loans, enforces civil rights laws in schools and provides federal funding for needy districts. The job cuts, if implemented, would leave the department with 2,183 workers, down from 4,133 when Trump took office in January. Nate Raymond has more: https://reut.rs/43MOkbp

A U.S. judge blocked provisions of President Donald Trump's order targeting attorneys at Perkins Coie on March 11, saying the legal profession was 'watching in horror' at what the law firm was experiencing.   U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said Perkins Coie was likely to ultimately prevail in court with its challenge of Trump's executive order, which was prompted by the firm's diversity, equity and inclusion policies and its prior work for Trump's political opponent Hillary Clinton.   The judge granted Perkins Coie's request for a temporary restraining order against an executive order that sought to prevent the firm from doing business with federal contractors and to deny its lawyers access to government officials and buildings.   Trump's executive order also suspended Perkins Coie lawyers' security clearances, but the law firm did not raise that issue in its request for a temporary restraining order.   Subscribe to The Daily Docket: http://reut.rs/4aBvwvO

The number of new federal lawsuits fell 14% in the 2024 fiscal year as a result of a decline in mass tort litigation driven in large part by 3M's decision to strike a $6 billion deal to settle litigation over its combat earplugs, according to the federal judiciary.   The steep-drop off in lawsuits contributed to an overall 11% decline in criminal and civil filings in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to a report released on March 11 by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.   New criminal cases meanwhile grew 6% to 69,802, driven in part by a 30% increase in filings for defendants charged with immigration offenses during the final fiscal year of President Joe Biden's administration.   Nate Raymond has the details: https://reut.rs/3R4cfLS

A year after Elon Musk urged U.S. companies to abandon Delaware as their legal home and follow Tesla to Texas, legislators in the two states considered bills in an unusual battle over corporate law that critics say benefits powerful shareholders. A U.S. judge blocked provisions of President Donald Trump's order targeting attorneys at Perkins Coie on March 12, saying the legal profession was 'watching in horror' at what the law firm was experiencing. A U.S. judge pressed President Donald Trump's administration for evidence of fraud, waste and abuse in a $20 billion climate funding program that the administration has moved to terminate. A federal judge said that President Donald Trump lacked the power to remove a Democratic member from the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) and ordered that Susan Tsui Grundmann be reinstated. Read more ➡️

Citing an American Bar Association diversity mandate for law schools, Florida is considering dropping a requirement that students graduate from an ABA-accredited school in order to sit for the state’s bar exam. The Supreme Court of Florida, comprised entirely of Republican-appointed justices, established a workgroup on March 12 to study the state's ABA requirement for admission and propose possible alternatives, with a report due by Sept. 30. The ABA's current diversity and inclusion rule requires that law schools provide “full opportunities” for “racial and ethnic minorities” and have a diverse student body “with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.” The ABA last month suspended enforcement of the current diversity rule and delayed approving a proposed revision in order to incorporate forthcoming guidance from the U.S. Department of Education. Florida is the first state to publicly weigh breaking with the ABA over its law school diversity and inclusion rule — which has garnered criticism from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Republicans who say its discriminatory. Subscribe to The Daily Docket: http://reut.rs/4aBvwvO