At Number One this week was the IRS's ongoing struggle to effectively communicate its revised FBAR rules. The common wisdom is that the guidance is helpful but that the IRS had set a very low (f)bar for itself. The SEC had four rule-making initiatives in the top 10, with final rules on e-proxy delivery, short-selling and money market reform and guidance on global accounting convergence.

The Supreme Court was busy again with an important holding on what constitutes corporate citizenship for purposes of federal diversity jurisdiction (in Hertz v Friend) and a considerably more esoteric holding (also on federal jurisdiction) as to copyright disputes (in Reed Elsevier). Still on IP disputes (but at the appellate court level), law firms continued to focus on the patent marking can of worms (or relators) opened up by the Federal Circuit's Forest Group, Inc. v. Bon Tool Co decision.

Perhaps the most interesting story of week, however, was the Delaware Chancery Court's holding in Selectica, which heartily endorsed Selectica's use, and unprecedented triggering, of a poison pill to protect its Net Operating Losses.

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."