Civil Law

“DOJ’s $2 Million Honeywell Settlement Under the Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative: What Compliance Failures Mean for Defense Contractors

Key Takeaways

  • DOJ used the FCA to settle with Honeywell Aerospace Inc. for $ 2,042,518 over allegations that a Honeywell business unit submitted claims for payment under a DoW contract while failing to comply with NIST SP 800-171 cybersecurity requirements incorporated through DFARS 252.204-7012, reinforcing that cybersecurity compliance failures can create significant FCA exposure for defense contractors.
  • The settlement arose from a 2022 qui tam whistleblower action filed by a former Honeywell employee, and DOJ reported a record
… Read the rest
Civil Law

How to Make Business Development Research More Useful for Lawyers

I’ve worked with lawyers who ask for a company research report before a meeting, receive a beautifully prepared document and then admit they only had time to skim the first page. I’ve also seen business development teams spend hours gathering information about a prospect without knowing exactly what the lawyer plans to do with it. Both situations illustrate a common challenge in law firm business development: we have access to an enormous amount of information, but we don’t always spend … Read the rest

Civil Law

Tuesday Tips: New and Noteworthy on SSRN

Neil Duxbury

The General Law Renaissance and the Common Law

Abstract

Of late, there has emerged an important body of legal scholarship sympathetically reassessing the concept of “general law” – unwritten legal norms discoverable by courts. This article shows that these reassessments run up against a problem when the general law in question is common law. The problem arises from a question: what makes common law valid as law in the first place? In England, the answer is that common-law … Read the rest

Civil Law

CA5: Property Owner Properly Asked For Jury Trial, So He Gets One

Check out the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s opinion in Ramirez v. City of Texas City, No. 25-40475 (Sep. 3, 2026), in which the court concluded that a property owner raising a procedural due process claim properly invoked his right to have that claim tried by a jury.

[Disclosure: this is from our shop.]

After a fire caused extensive but repairable damage to Ramirez’s home, the city labeled the home “substandard” and demanded he do something. … Read the rest

Civil Law

The One-Carbon Mistake That Cost A Patent Its Priority Date

Nobody likes the grammar police. Patent lawyers, unfortunately, may be the exception.

In Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Pfizer Inc. No. 2025-1427 (Fed. Cir. June 23, 2026), one character did a lot of damage. The difference between C2 and C1 cost Enanta the priority date of its provisional application—and led the Federal Circuit to affirm that the challenged claims were anticipated.

Turns out proofreading really can be worth millions.

But the case raises a more interesting question: Even if Enanta had … Read the rest

Civil Law

The Air We Share – Why Indoor Air Is Becoming a Real Estate Risk

The Air We Breathe – Indoor Air Quality Is Becoming a Real Estate Issue

The most dangerous environmental threat is the one we breathe every day. Air pollution is the world’s largest environmental health risk, responsible for roughly 7 million premature deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization.

For real estate owners, however, the more surprising issue may be what happens inside the building.

A now widely quoted WHO assessment released this summer found that indoor … Read the rest