Good morning. Welcome back to The Daily Docket, your go-to morning newsletter from Westlaw Today for the latest on courts, lawyers and the legal profession. Oracle and Google are facing off at SCOTUS, a U.S. House antitrust panel is blasting Big Tech, Paul Weiss says no to pandemic bonuses and a MoFo associate has career advice on TikTok. It's Wednesday, what could go wrong?

Were you forwarded this email? Subscribe here.

Oracle, Google face off at top court in multi-billion dollar IP feud

REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

A long-running $8 billion-plus lawsuit by Oracle accusing Google of infringing the tech company's copyrights to build its Android smartphone operating system is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court today in a case IP lawyers say could shape the level of copyright protection afforded to software.

A shorthanded, eight-justice court will hear Google's appeal of a Federal Circuit ruling reviving the lawsuit alleging it copied thousands of lines of computer code from Oracle's Java programming language without a license to make Android, which runs most of the world's smartphones, Jan Wolfe reports.

Goldstein & Russell's Thomas Goldstein and Orrick's E. Joshua Rosenkranz will make their arguments for Google and Oracle, respectively, by phone, the new-school method the centuries-old court has adopted to hear cases amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Google argues the shortcut commands it copied into Android do not deserve copyright protection because they promote software innovation by helping developers write programs to work across platforms. Even if they could be copyrighted, Google says the "fair use" defense to copyright infringement, which protects copying that transforms an original copyrighted work, holds since its copying resulted in a new smartphone platform. Read more.

Paul Weiss says associate bonuses don't 'feel right' amid client economic troubles

REUTERS/Andrew Kelley

Major New York law firms have rushed recently to reward associates with special bonuses of up to $40,000 for their work during the coronavirus pandemic. But Paul Weiss will not be joining the club, with its chairman saying the perks are not appropriate at a time when clients are under financial pressure, Caroline Spiezio reports.

Paul Weiss Chairman Brad Karp in an internal memo on Tuesday said that while the firm would take into account any coronavirus-themed bonuses paid by its rivals when it decides how much to award in its typical year-end bonuses, paying them out now "does not feel right."

"So many of our clients and others across our community are experiencing unprecedented economic trauma, including the shuttering of their businesses and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, as a direct result of this pandemic," he wrote.

The decision is in contrast to a trend among its Wall Street peers like Sullivan & Cromwell and Simpson Thacher that have decided to match a $7,500 to $40,000 bonus range set by Davis Polk. Kirkland & Ellis and Cravath are similarly sitting-out the bonus race. Get the full scoop.

Industry buzz: Big firms forge ahead with captive alternative legal service providers, and more

A growing number of law firms have created "captive" alternative legal service providers -- entities within law firms to compete with outside providers that are making gains in the market, according to a report by legal industry advisory firm Baretz+Brunelle.

Looking at the Am Law 100 and Global 100 law firms combined, 48 firms have created these business units, which use technology to increase efficiency in areas such as e-discovery, due diligence and contract review, Sara Merken reports.

Elsewhere in the legal profession...

Sheppard Mullin has become the latest law firm to roll back paycuts it imposed in response to the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic while also announcing it would lay off some of the staff members it had previously furloughed.
Healthcare deals are keeping Big Law busy, with at least nine firms scoring work on deals announced this week.
Virtual firm Scale, a new law firm stacked with former in-house and Big Law attorneys, is emerging out of "stealth mode" and growing fast.
Former Fortress Investment Group partner Brandon Baer will launch his own litigation funder, Contingency Capital, on Nov. 1 with a potential $1.5 billion in commitments already lined up.
U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed by an anti-feminist lawyer in July, said she plans to return to the bench in an interview with "Good Morning America."

We want to provide you the best legal news in the industry. Please take a few minutes to complete a short survey on how you use our content and what else you'd like to see.

It's not like 'Suits.' MoFo associate takes law mentorship to TikTok

Source: Morrison & Foerster

Is being a lawyer like being on the show "Suits?" Not really, but it's the most common question Morrison & Foerster associate Cecillia Xie gets on her TikToks where, with more than 95,000 followers, she serves up some real talk on topics like the LSAT, student debt and post-grad career paths.

Xie said her TikTok was born of the pandemic. New York City's lockdown left her with free time and, looking for a creative outlet, she made a TikTok about working remotely as a lawyer. "The pressure to bill while at home is kind of the worst because you never have that spatial separation from your computer," Xie said.

Her account has become a new type of law mentorship, one democratized by social media and accessible to anyone with the internet. "It's always great to do traditional types of mentorship, but on some level you feel that the students who would benefit the most aren’t even able to access some resources," Xie said.

She hopes to show her followers that there’s more to law than what's presented in law schools. "What I want to encourage young attorneys to do is take a step back from the environment of law school and think about what really makes them happy and what practices would make their career rewarding," Xie said.

Coming up today

Ford Motor Co will urge the U.S. Supreme Court to place limits on where corporations can be sued outside of their home states, after the top courts in Missouri and Montana allowed state residents involved in in-state car accidents to proceed with product liability suits against the automaker. Hogan Lovells' Sean Marotta will argue for Ford and will face Gupta Wessler's Deepak Gupta for the plaintiffs.
Genaro Garcia Luna, a former Mexican government official who oversaw public security in his country, is expected to be arraigned by U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan in Brooklyn on charges that he accepted millions of dollars in bribes to protect the Sinaloa drug cartel once run by imprisoned drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
The 5th Circuit will hear a challenge by civil rights groups including Mi Familia Vota and the Texas NAACP to Texas' in-person election practices that seeks greater accommodations to promote voter safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, including more polling locations and more time for early voting.
Investors in Robert Allen Stanford's Ponzi scheme will urge the 5th Circuit to overturn a Texas federal judge's ruling barring them from intervening in litigation seeking damages from banks including Trustmark National Bank that handled deposits for Stanford International Bank.
The Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers will urge the state's top court to overturn a ruling that rejected the two-year suspension it recommended for Duane Morris litigation partner Doreen Zankowski for overbilling clients while she was at Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr. She was instead suspended for six months.

"To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons."

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee's Antitrust Subcommittee in 449-page report that describes instances where Google, Apple, Amazon.com and Facebook misused their power to maintain dominance. The report found they use "killer acquisitions" to smite rivals, charged exorbitant fees, and forced small businesses into "oppressive" contracts. (Reuters)

In the courts

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments over whether to revive an Arkansas law regulating pharmacy benefits managers' drug-reimbursement rates. WilmerHale's Seth Waxman, arguing for the trade group Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, urged the justices to uphold an 8th Circuit ruling finding federal law preempts the statute. (Reuters)
Justices on Supreme Court also appeared torn over whether to allow three Muslim men who claim they were placed on the government’s "no-fly list" for refusing to become informants to sue federal officials for damages under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. (New York Times)
The 9th Circuit at the request of Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich put on hold a lower-court ruling won by Democrats that would have given Arizona voters neglect to sign their early ballot affidavits up to five days post-election to fix the error. (AP)
A group of J.C. Penney lenders and noteholders through lawyers led by Akin Gump's Marty Brimmage is working to construct its own bid for the department store chain’s real estate assets, saying an existing offer from senior lenders undervalues the company and leaves junior creditors in the lurch. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David Jones in Houston is holding a hearing today related to the proposed sale. (Reuters)
General Electric has received a so-called Wells notice from the SEC notifying it that its staff is weighing whether to recommend pursuing a case against the industrial conglomerate related to the surprise $6.2 billion accounting charge it disclosed in 2018 related to its run-off insurance operations. Latham & Watkins partners Sean Berkowitz and BJ Trach are representing GE. (Reuters)
Judges on the 1st Circuit signaled they would likely uphold a ruling won by the ACLU that blocked the Trump administration from sending five Mexican nationals who illegally crossed the U.S. border back to their home country to await legal proceedings. (Reuters)
The U.S. Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to reinstate reinstate Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence for helping carry out the 2013 attack. (Reuters)

Industry moves

Kilpatrick Townsend's unfair imports practice head Josh Pond joined Crowell & Moring. (Reuters)
Goodwin Procter continues its life sciences hiring spree with the addition of former Hogan Lovells life sciences transactions team co-lead Adam Bellack. (Reuters)
IP and data privacy lawyer Sarah Schaedler left Kirkland & Ellis for Orrick. She's Orrick's fourth new partner to join the technology transactions team since September. (Reuters)
Holland & Knight added Senate Democratic lobbyist Todd Wooten to its public policy & regulation practice group as a partner in D.C. (Reuters)

Columnist spotlight: Why Netflix and Hulu really, really want this Texas class action to be dismissed

Do Netflix and Hulu owe a portion of their revenues to cities and towns across Texas, Nevada and Ohio? Three class actions allegethe streaming giants do, claiming that state laws requiring cable operators and "video service providers" to register with the state and pay a franchise fee in return for their use of public land for wires and cables apply to the companies. Netflix and Hulu have filed motions to dismiss, and Alison Frankel takes a look at their arguments: Netflix’s lawyers at Latham & Watkins decried the "radical implications" of the class action’s "drastic" interpretation of the Texas law. Hulu, represented by Wilson Sonsini, argued that the Texas plaintiffs' theory "represents a dramatic expansion of internet taxation" that would force every video content provider, from CBS and HBO to TikTok, to pass fees onto their users. Read the full column here.

Check out other recent pieces from all our columnists: Alison Frankel, Jenna Greene and Hassan Kanu.

Lawyer speak: Is timekeeping for government contractors material under the False Claims Act?

Over the past several years, there have been a number of high-profile FCA settlements for alleged timekeeping deficiencies, ranging from $13 million to more than $30 million. Despite these settlements, a recent case in the Southern District of New York involving falsified timekeeping handed a win to a government contractor. Potomac Law Group partner Derek Adams explores whether or not the case, which is being appealed to the 2nd Circuit, gives new hope to government contractors and grantees fighting claims of FCA violations.

Correction: An item yesterday about how Davis Wright Tremaine is considering options that better match remote work misspelled the firm's name.

Want more legal news?