Conversely, in New Process Steel v NLRB, the Court held that the @600 decisions taken by a two-member panel of the NLRB over 27 months were invalid. In doing so, the Court has handed the newly quorate and (on its face) strongly pro-labor NLRB a tantalizing array of cases/issues that it can review at its pleasure.

The Supreme Court also agreed to review an interesting case at the interstices of life sciences and securities law. In Matrixx Initiatives, Inc. v. Siracusano, the Court will examine "whether a plaintiff can state a claim under § 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act and SEC Rule 10b-5 based on a pharmaceutical company's nondisclosure of adverse event reports even though the reports are not alleged to be statistically significant." Although the immediate question deals with when "adverse event reports" are statistically significant enough to require disclosure under US securities laws, the decision is likely to reach well beyond the life sciences/pharma sector to impact any public company subject to liability under the SEC's Rule 10b-5.

We added more than a hundred Alerts on various aspects of the two pieces of mega legislation that have dominated Capitol Hill over the last few months. Health Care Reform has rapidly moved into its implementation phase and law firms continue to bore down into implications for the health, insurance, pharmaceutical and medical device sectors. The details of the impending financial reform legislation continued to be hammered out in committee and we expect the flow of Alerts to ramp up even further when the target stops moving. As it stands, we have divided our RAFSA material into fairly macro-level baskets in the areas of the House/Senate Reconciliation Process, CorpGov/Executive Compensation, Financial Institutions/Banking Reform, OTC Derivatives & Private Funds.

Financial reform continues apace in Europe as well with the new UK coalition government deciding to scrap the Financial Services Authority altogether in favor/favour of more "prudential" entities. In Germany, BaFin continues to hammer out details of new rules that will effectively ban naked short-selling.

Back in the US, the FTC has proposed a "Third Way" for the regulation of broadband Internet services that would largely return to it regulatory powers recently snatched from it in Comcast.

Also of note, the Federal Circuit has raised the bar for would be patent false marking claimants in Pequignot v. Solo Cup, significantly stemming the flood of such claims that it had unleashed with its Forest Group, Inc. v. Bon Tool Co decision. In Solo Cup, the Federal Circuit has now held that the claimant qui tam patent attorney (and similarly situated claimants intent on filling cups, plastic or otherwise, with qui tam gold) seeking $10 trillion in damages for the failure to correctly mark patents on plastic cups needed to provide evidence of "deceptive intent."

Whatever the developments, we bring it all together in Hot Topics to give you an extraordinary range of legal and commercial insight into how change can be managed by corporate America. On the menu bar above you will see a link to what is keeping lawyers up late tonight trying to fix/anticipate your problems called "Most Recent Hot Topics" as well as everything else from the last six months sorted by "Area of Law," "Corporate Function" and of course "The Credit Crisis."