Company Investigator

Brooklyn Law School students now have a new tool they can use to conduct due diligence on M&A targets, to advise clients regarding competition, and to evaluate potential buyers to ensure financial solidity. In a recent press release, Thomson Reuters announced the launch of Company Investigator, a comprehensive resource for information on private and public companies. Users can find information on companies to assist with business development, litigation, due diligence and a host of other applications.

Company Investigator accesses more than 30 million company profiles — of which 20 million are hard-to-find private companies — including general corporate information, subsidiary data, legal disputes, secretary of state filings, regulatory filings, and material agreements. Users can search by company name or other terms to locate a search subject.

Company Investigator is available on WestlawNext and presents information in a manner that makes it easy to analyze corporate “family tree” structures, relationships among corporate entities, and other company-related information, such as recently filed court dockets, bankruptcy filings and more.

Users can easily create customizable reports that assemble all of the relevant business and legal information. Email alerts can be set up to provide notification of new business developments or changes to a business’s status. With its comprehensive data as well as powerful search and information management tools, Company Investigator saves hours of research time and helps effectively manage risk.

“Legal industry professionals depend on relevant, accurate and current company information,” said Steve Obenski, senior director and general manager, Business Law Solutions, Thomson Reuters. “Company Investigator is remarkably easy to use while at the same time incredibly powerful. It makes it fast and easy to understand corporate structures, relationships and other information about business entities. This is a must-have tool that is invaluable for transactional lawyers, litigators and legal researchers alike.”

A podcast on how Company Investigator can help find information on public and private companies is available here.

Traditional Irish Laws

Congratulations to Brooklyn Law School alumna Catherine F. Duggan, Class of 1987, who has written The Lost Laws of Ireland: How the Brehon Laws Shaped Early Irish Society. The book, published by Dublin-based Glasnevin Publishing on June 11, 2013, tells how the ancient laws of Celtic Ireland were used from the time before Patrick until the 17th century when they were outlawed and disappeared. Crafted by judges, known as Brehons, the laws were surprisingly modern in their approach to timeless issues and reflect a complex and sophisticated society. This book gives an outline of the main features of the laws and their history, and ultimately focuses on certain themes that are significant to the modern reader, such as equity and fairness, transparent legal process and women's rights. Many of the legal manuscripts have been lost or destroyed and the laws were not translated into English until modern times. As a result, they have mostly remained obscure and unstudied. Only recently have they given up their secrets. The ancient laws provide a window into society in early Ireland where learning was revered, social mobility was expected and fairness and harmony were social goals. Their resilience demonstrates their value and effectiveness. The Brehon legal system came to an end officially in 1605 after enduring for over a thousand years.

Researchers at the BLS Library can learn more about the subject of Celtic Law using SARA to locate Traditional Irish Laws by Mary Dowling Daley and illustrated by Ian McCullough (Call #KDK172 .D25 1998). It is a short book only 79 pages in length with a humorous look into the laws and culture of the ancient Irish. The BLS Library also has the print edition of The Brehon Laws: A Legal Handbook by Laurence Ginnell (Call #KDK145 .G56 1993). Both of these items are located in the BLS Library International Collection. The BLS Library also has the HeinOnline digital version of Brehon Laws: A Legal Handbook (1894).

Writing Competiton Winner on SSRN

Dominic A. Saglibene, Brooklyn Law School Class of 2014, has posted his note “The U.K. Bribery Act: A Benchmark for Anticorruption Reform in the U.S.” on SSRN.  The note is scheduled for publication next year in Volume 24 of the Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, a journal of the University of Iowa College Of Law. Saglibene won the Trandafir Writing Competition for the note. For more, see the news item at the Brooklyn Law School website. The abstract reads:
 
This Note will argue that the U.S. should look to the U.K. Bribery Act in amending the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ("FCPA") to criminalize foreign bribery across the board. Part I will introduce the thesis. Part II will explain the relationship between public and private bribery, and outline how some nations have come to recognize that overlooking private bribery undermines anticorruption laws and policies in general. Part III will describe the FCPA and other anti-bribery laws in the U.S., and present the U.K. Act as an improvement on the FCPA. Part IV will then discuss U.S. prosecutions - especially U.S. v. Carson - demonstrating the inadequacy of American law against bribery in the foreign private sector. Part V will conclude.

Happy Independence Day

Brooklyn Law Library’s copy of the book For Liberty and Equality: The Life and Times of the Declaration of Independence (Call # E221 .T74 2012) by Loyola University Chicago School of Law Professor Alexander Tsesis offers a well-researched narrative of the many surprising ways in which the Declaration of Independence has influenced American politics, law, and society. The drafting of the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement are all heavily indebted to the Declaration's principles of representative government. The author demonstrates that from the founding on, the Declaration has played a central role in American political and social advocacy, congressional debates, and presidential decisions. He focuses on how successive generations internalized, adapted, and interpreted its meaning, but he also shines a light on the many American failures to live up to the ideals enshrined in the document. Based on extensive research from primary sources such as newspapers, diaries, letters, transcripts of speeches, and congressional records, For Liberty and Equality shows how our founding document shaped America through successive eras and why its influence has always been crucial to the nation and our way of life.

Chapters include: Becoming independent -- The nation's infancy -- Youthful republic -- Compromising for the sake of expansion -- Jacksonian era democracy -- Subordination -- The unraveling bonds of union -- Sectional cataclysm -- Reconstruction -- Racial tensions -- Advancing women's causes -- The changing face of labor -- International impact & domestic advance -- The declaration in a New Deal state -- Independence principles in the civil rights era.

Free Apps for US Legal Publications

Law Technology News (LTN) magazine and website reports that ALM, the leading provider of specialized business news and information focused on the legal sector, has launched 14 smartphone apps for use on Apple Inc.'s iPhones, iPods, and iPads. The apps provide content from the company's national and regional web and print publications, and support iOS 6.1 and above. The available publications are:

The American Lawyer
Corporate Counsel
Law Technology News
The National Law Journal
Connecticut Law Tribune
Daily Business Review
Daily Report Online
Delaware Business Court Insider
Delaware Law Weekly
New Jersey Law Journal
New York Law Journal
Texas Lawyer
The Legal Intelligencer
The Recorder

An ALM press release stated: The apps offer a superior and faster reading experience than what is possible through a smartphone or tablet Web browser. They also provide offline reading capability so users can view news stories and other articles even when they are not connected to the Web. . . The apps are being sponsored by leading financial and legal institutions who are providing end-users free complimentary access to the content during the launch sponsorship.

Content that might otherwise be behind a paywall is now available thanks to the sponsor. In fact, if you look at the NYLJ front page using the iPhone’s Safari browser, several of these stories are locked. If you look at the same stories using the app, they are unlocked. Brooklyn Law School students can now regularly follow any of these ALM publications.

Prison Law Libraries

With New York State’s recent adoption of a rule on Inmate Access to Legal Reference Materials, the article Ineffective Assistance of Library: The Failings and the Future of Prison Law Libraries, 101 Geo. L.J. 1171, is timely reading. See Westlaw or LexisNexis for digital access or check the Brooklyn Law School Library Circulation Desk for the print version.

The abstract reads in part:

The prison law library has long been a potent symbol of the inmate's right to access the courts. But it has never been a practical tool for providing that access. This contradiction lies at the core of the law library doctrine. It takes little imagination to see the problem with requiring untrained inmates, many of them illiterate or non-English speakers, to navigate the world of postconviction relief and civil rights litigation with nothing more than the help of a few library books. Yet law libraries are ubiquitous in American prisons. Now, in light of a technological revolution in legal research methods, prison libraries face an existential crisis that requires prison officials, courts, scholars, and inmates to reconsider the very purpose of the prison law library. .  . This Article uses original historical research to show how prison law libraries arose, not as a means of accessing the courts, but rather as a means of controlling inmates' behavior. . . This historical account helps explain a prison law library system that never really made sense in terms of providing access to the courts.

Unpaid Intern Lawsuits

Unpaid internships suffered a setback this month when US District Court Judge William H. Pauley III ruled in Glatt v. Fox Searchlight Pictures that the defendant violated minimum wage and overtime laws when it failed to pay interns who worked on the movie Black Swan. The lead plaintiff is a Georgetown University law school student. The decision, the first to adopt this argument, rigorously applied the Department of Labor six-part test where internships in the for-profit private sector are viewed as employment relationships for which the federal minimum wage and overtime rules will apply, unless the intern is truly receiving training. The six criteria are:

(1) The internship is similar to training that would be given in an educational environment;
(2) The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;
(3) The intern is not replacing employees and works under close supervision;
(4) The sponsor of the intern does not derive immediate benefit from intern's activities and at times, its operations may actually be impeded;
(5) The intern is not entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship;
(6) The sponsor and the intern understand the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

While not every factor weighed strongly in favor of finding the plaintiffs entitled to pay, Judge William H. Pauley III concluded that the plaintiffs “were classified improperly as unpaid interns and are ‘employees’ covered by the FLSA,” and that “[t]he benefits they may have received—such as knowledge of how a production or accounting office functions or references for future jobs—are the results of simply having worked as any other employee works, not of internships designed to be uniquely educational to the interns and of little utility to the employer.”

For more on the decision, see the Bloomberg BNA article Judge Rules Fox Searchlight Interns Are FLSA Employees, Certifies Class Action which concludes by noting that “In the past few years, unpaid interns of for-profit, private sector employers have brought several wage and hour suits in New York courts. The district court's ruling here is the first to find that such interns are employees under the FLSA.” The article cites to another case from the Southern District of New York, Wang v. The Hearst Corporation, where Judge Harold Baer ruled differently in denying partial summary judgment on the employee issue and finding various factual disputes concerning DOL's unpaid intern criteria.

Another class action, Bickerton v. Rose, which a former intern filed in New York Supreme Court last year, alleged that she regularly worked at least 25 hours per week without pay as an intern for The Charlie Rose show. The case ended when Rose and his production company agreed to pay up to $250,000 as a settlement without admitting any wrongdoing.