They know it is risky drinking untreated water from a borehole used by so many other people. “We have no option. This water is dangerous as you can see, just check,” says Kavalanjila, pointing to a pile of human waste nearby.
City authorities say they have had to shut down water supplies for 96 hours a week – more than half the time, often in two-day blocks – to cope with a sharp fall in reservoir levels caused by the country’s worst drought in years.
The shortages have exacerbated an economic crisis marked by shortages of foreign exchange, fuel, medicines and power that has triggered protests and political unrest.
Kavalanjila says the cut-offs often go on for longer than scheduled in his Luveve township.
He carries the well water home in buckets and containers then his wife Rumbidzai boils it before using it for bathing, flushing toilets and, sometimes, cooking.
“At times you see there will be little organisms in the water and even when you are bathing you feel your body itching,” Rumbidzai told Reuters in the local Ndebele language while her nine-year-old son had a bath to get ready for school.
“So if you boil the water it gets better.
DELAYED DAM
Bulawayo city has decommissioned two of its dams after water fell below pumping levels, according to the city’s director of engineering services Simelani Dube.
The remaining four dams have an average capacity of 35% and falling, he added. “We are projecting that in the next three to four weeks we might lose the third dam. It’s currently sitting above 10% in terms of capacity.”
Authorities say the long-term answer is for Bulawayo to build a new dam 100km (60 miles) away to draw water direct from the Zambezi River.
But the project, first mooted in 1912 by white colonists and finally started in 2004 is still is only a third complete.
Cassian Mugomezi, a sprightly 84-year old pensioner who has lived in the Luveve township for more than five decades, said the water cuts were some of the worst he could remember.
“If it does not rain this year I don’t know what we are going to do,” he said.
Like Kavalanjila, he has had to rely on open wells and other privately-run projects. A nearby church pumps out clean water through its own borehole. Today, though, it is shut down in one of the city’s regular power cuts that can last up for 18 hours.
When tragedy falls, my phone rings. A helicopter flying Kobe Bryant and eight others crashes, and people call me. I am not a first responder, a pastor, or a crisis manager. I am not family or friend. I am just a trusts and estates attorney.
Everyone knows you need a last will and testament regardless of your familial, marital, or financial situation. Jumpstarting the process, however, is often difficult as we do not want to contemplate our mortality. Disaster, whether a car crash, illness, or crime, is the (im)perfect impetus to take care of our affairs.
The images of fiery aircraft against the beautiful California terrain are enough to make anyone sick, scared, and depressed. The follow-up images of icon Kobe Bryant, hugging his now-deceased 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, are heart-wrenching. The interviews of Matt Mauser who together with his three young children just lost his wife and their mother, Christina, are distressing. We are human, we cannot help but hypothesize as to what would happen if we were in the helicopter, or more likely, the car, the crosswalk, or the hospital. What would our families do if we passed away? Would they have enough money? Would they have enough direction?
Kobe left behind a wife and three daughters. As a professional, his case is excruciating to review as it also involves the death and estate of minors, something no parent should ever have to address. As more details emerge, we will see what kind of estate plan Kobe Bryant established, given his large family and enormous wealth. For his spouse, it is crucial for her to review her own estate plan as she proceeds in life as a single parent. Additionally, Kobe’s estate representative may wish to investigate whether there are any legal causes of action that have arisen from the crash.
A last will and testament dictates who controls your estate when you die. If you are over the age of 18, it is imperative that you execute a will and testament. If you die without one, your home state will determine who gets your assets based on its laws of intestacy. This means that if you do not have a spouse or children, parents or siblings, more remote relatives may receive. I have witnessed on more than one occasion, the distribution of an estate to distant cousins who had no relationship with the decedent, but received his assets because he died without a last will and testament, and they were his closest relatives according to the probate law.
Additionally, for parents, guardians of children are nominated under a last will and testament. If you do not specify your choice, the local court will decide. Without stating your wishes, a probate judge may select an individual who does not share your parenting values or worse, whom you do not like. You may not think your mother-in-law would make a good guardian, but a judge may disagree. Last wills are also excellent vehicles to deal with estate tax issues, should your assets rise to that level.
To round out an estate plan, a power of attorney and health care proxy must also be executed. A power of attorney appoints an agent to control financial decisions while you are alive but incapacitated. A health care proxy appoints an agent to control medical decisions if you are unable to voice your wishes.
Admittedly illness, incapacity, and death are difficult to talk about. Executing an estate plan must be high on your adulting list alongside annual physical and dental exams and financial planning. The good news is that once you complete estate planning, you likely do not need to repeat the process for a while, although it is important to review it from time and time. Completing an estate plan, which means actually signing the documents, also provides peace of mind, so that when tragedy, close or remote, strikes, there is no need to call me in a panic.
Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com.
This was a disaster for Republicans. A total, unmitigated legal and Constitutional disaster.
—Ari Melber, MSNBC host, taking Ken Starr to task over his performance at the impeachment trial yesterday. As Melber noted, Starr’s position was wildly different than his position when he led the impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton, “He was out there shadow-boxing with himself. Constitutionally, we watched Ken Starr punch himself in the face and then walk off the floor.”
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
When David Russekoff moved from the Upper East Side to Greenwich in 2009, he knew his new lakeside lifestyle would present tax complications. After all, the chief investment officer at Perry Capital still worked in Manhattan. And he and the missus were holding on to their summer home on Shelter Island. Still, nothing insurmountable for a guy who took home more than $90 million from 2010 through 2013, nothing the accountants couldn’t figure out: Money earned in New York gets taxed by New York, money earned in Connecticut gets taxed Connecticut. Simple, relatively-speaking.
But as Julian Robertson could have told him, nothing is simple when it comes to New York taxes, especially if you spend that crucial 183rd day of the year on the wrong side of the state line. Sure, New York income is taxed in New York, and Connecticut income in Connecticut, but what about income earned in the ether? In no fixed geographic place? Well, it turns out, it’s really better to earn all of your income in a single, clearly-identifiable jurisdiction.
A New York administrative law judge found in December that David Russekoff, a hedge-fund manager who lives in Greenwich, Conn., owed about $9 million in taxes and $1 million in interest on investment income because he was considered a “statutory resident” of New York too…. The tax court, citing a 1998 State Court of Appeals decision, found that investment income was “intangible” and not tied to any place and couldn’t be considered out-of-state income. It denied a credit for taxes paid to Connecticut.
I understand that not everyone might have the same respect for arguments regarding states’ rights, but I also have to notice “both sides” invoke the principles of federalism quite regularly in two important areas:
State Police Power
A state’s police powers represent a fundamental right of state power granted by the Constitution. Traditionally, attempts at federal encroachment to circumvent state police powers has been condemned by legal conservatives. It was the celebrated conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who in Printz v. United States declared the federal government could not require “local police to assist in the enforcement of federal gun control law.” The political “catch,” so to speak, regarding that legal decision is that the same concept can be applied to federal immigration law, and that is how you get sanctuary cities. It is also where you can probably begin to understand how the same state police power can produce both liberal and conservative champions.
Despite past instances of grand defense by both “sides,” however, threats to state police power remain. For example, the federal policy known as “adoption” is a program where federal agencies are allowed to “circumvent state restrictions on asset seizures” by collaborating with state police and prosecutors. The adoption program was abandoned during the last presidency out of a claimed respect for federalism but was reinstituted by the current administration’s Department of Justice. With the observable electoral state push in recent years to reform civil asset forfeiture — to require a conviction before seizure for example, something federal law does not require — the reinstitution of the federal adoption program represents a gross intrusion upon state police power. The residents of those states should expect their nonelected state officers to uphold their laws. When the federal government provides gross incentivization for state officers to circumvent the law, faithfulness to state law, and thus respect to state power, is severely undermined.
This intrusion by the adoption program is made altogether worse by the fact that the feds (along with pretty much everybody else), have a terrible track record of abuse and targeting of innocents when it comes to such property seizures. Publications such as Reason have long “detailed numerous cases of people whose cars, money, and even homes were seized for petty drug crimes or, in some cases, just for having large amounts of cash on hand.” In fact, the state shift toward reforming civil asset forfeiture is driven in part by these records of abuses.
As teased above, another example of federal encroachment on state police power does in fact involve enforcement of federal immigration laws. As Damon Root of Reason explained, the federal government has sued the State of California over the California Values Act of 2017 and has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. However, again because of the Printz precedent, on the merits the federal government should lose. After all, as Root explains:
“The same logic that applied in Printz would seem to apply equally well in U.S. v. California. If it’s unconstitutional for the feds to commandeer the states into enforcing a federal gun control scheme, it’s also unconstitutional for the feds to commandeer the states into enforcing federal immigration policy.”
It remains to be seen whether this Printz doctrine will have another champion to defend it against another federal encroachment.
Religious Liberty
I apologize to anyone who may be sick of me discussing this topic. Maybe the reason I continually return to it is because, like others, I am simply a glutton for punishment. But I would also be remiss if I did not include this subject. Because one the most egregious proposed infringements of federal power over the states is happening right now in the Montana Department of Revenue v. Espinoza case. The facts are quite simple, the Supreme Court has held that states have the right to strengthen Establishment Clause liberty with state-specific statutes if they so choose. Moreover, even the petitioners in the Espinoza case acknowledged during oral argument that as a function of this Establishment Clause liberty, states can choose not to fund secular and religious private schools entirely. Now, you and everyone else can read right here and see that this is exactly what the Montana Supreme Court did. In 1972, during its state constitutional convention, public hearings were held in the Montana on the subject of religious liberty. Voices at the time, among whom the religious were most prominent, expressed the desire to avoid state funding of religious schools in Montana as a means to protect against state control over religious education. In accordance with these wishes, the 1972 Montana state constitutional convention adopted a “no aid” provision into its state constitution.
Accordingly, if you are a statutory or constitutional originalist, who respects state sovereignty and legislative authority, the Espinoza case should be a relatively straightforward case of the application of a recognized state liberty. However, what we are seeing from both political and legal voices in describing the Espinoza case is nothing short of incredible. According to some, the Montana Supreme Court is guilty of upholding a bigot-inspired religious discrimination by the state. To this astounding portrayal I am forced to repeat that both parties agree the Montana Supreme Court in its decision treated secular and religious private schools the same. That the record clearly illustrates the Montana State Constitutional Convention of 1972 erased its old Blaine Amendment-type system by starting “all over again.” To characterize what the Montana Supreme Court did in upholding the will of its 1972 state convention as though it is upholding a nineteenth-century Blaine Amendment-inspired form of bigotry should be journalistic/legal malpractice. Yet, during oral argument, members on the U.S. Supreme Court asked questions comparing what Montana was upholding to racial discrimination. The lesson here is that state power will always need a worthy champion.
Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.
There are a lot of times in this life where lawyers find themselves introducing needless complexity to simple human tasks. After a while lawyers become so numb to it that they it doesn’t even register that most people at parties don’t offer a 30-second spiel clarifying that they aren’t acting as a lawyer when someone tries to strike up a conversation. When we say that the law robs you of your humanity we’re not talking about representing Exxon, we’re talking about making your children sign liquidated damages agreements before throwing out their baby toys.
Few zones of humanity see more unnecessary legal meddling than the email footer. Most people conclude emails with a signature, but attorneys need to muck up the flow of the email with disclaimers and clawback edicts and privilege flags that are probably misapplied to the content. It’s not uncommon for the boilerplate below the signature to drag on longer than the email itself.
But this is a new one when it comes to boilerplate:
I DO NOT GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS EMAIL. I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO MAKE CHANGES TO THE CONTENTS, AND MEANINGS, OF THIS EMAIL AT ANY TIME IN THE FUTURE.
That’s from an actual attorney email from a law firm. And we’re not going to single them out, because as lawyers it’s easy to see how someone gets to the point where they write something like this. Someone tried to pull a fast one by misinterpreted some off-the-cuff comment in an email and rather than write it off as almost assuredly an isolated event or rely upon common sense stifling future bad actors, the firm decided to just throw this into the boilerplate and call it good.
But if you’re going to stretch the limits of plain talk, why not go all the way? Just load it up with as much as you want and hope the daunting block of text wards off any inquiry.
“REMEMBER THAT MY ESSENCE CANNOT BE REDUCED TO FIXED FORM RENDERING THIS COMMUNICATION BUT A TRANSIENT MARKER OF A NOW PAST REALITY. IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING, SET IT FREE, IF IT COMES BACK TO YOU IT CONTAINED CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION AND WAS SENT IN ERROR. LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST. IF YOU DON’T STOP TO LOOK AROUND ONCE IN A WHILE, THE CONCLUSIONS REACHED ABOVE MIGHT BE INVALIDATED BY EVOLVING PRECEDENT. ALSO NOT LICENSED IN CONNECTICUT.”
In all seriousness, real people don’t talk this way and while society expects lawyers to communicate a little differently, when the boilerplate starts to strain at the seams of basic human communication, it runs the risk of alienating the clients. Protecting your practice from disingenuous bad actors can’t reach the point where it leaves reasonable clients snickering. Take some time to reevaluate the boilerplate and make sure it mimics how people talk as much as possible.
On the other hand, clients aren’t going to read the boilerplate anyway so who cares?
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All candidates must be also admitted to the Texas State Bar. If you are a mid-level looking to take your disputes practice to the highest level, this is your opportunity. We know the partners at this firm well and can give you more details over the phone.
Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa attends a rally against Western sanctions in Harare, Zimbabwe October 25, 2019. REUTERS/Philimon Bulawayo
In June last year, authorities in the southern African nation re-introduced the Zimbabwe dollar, ending a decade of dollarisation, in a move that sent inflation soaring to three-digit figures.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government made it illegal to charge customers in U.S. dollars, but many businesses still do. Miners and some companies in the tourism sector were, however, allowed to pay workers in dollars.
The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority said it had discovered that some businesses were charging in foreign currencies and should therefore “remit (the) taxes in foreign currencies”.
This includes value added tax, capital gains, pay-as-you-earn and income tax.
Without dollar or gold reserves, the local currency has continued to weaken against the greenback, but Mnangagwa maintains that there is no going back to dollarisation.
The opposition and some economists say Zimbabwe should abandon the local currency for the dollar to stabilise prices and encourage foreign investment.
Educator and novelist Neal Hovelmeier’s life changed forever in 2018. The longtime deputy head of school at St. John’s College, a boys’ academy in Borrowdale, a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, was at his desk on a September afternoon when the email arrived. It was a short, direct note from a journalist at a local paper who was writing an article about him that would run the following day. “Do you wish to comment?” the reporter asked.
“I was about to be outed in a country that hates homosexuals,” said Hovelmeier, the Robert G. James Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Harvard Scholar at Risk. “I knew immediately that this was that awful moment of reckoning and that what had been an intensely personal life for me was going to be made into a public debacle.”
Being gay isn’t illegal in Zimbabwe, but according to the country’s Criminal Law Act, consensual physical conduct between men is punishable with a fine, or up to one year in prison, or both. In addition, the nation’s new constitution, approved by parliament in 2013 and signed into law by longtime authoritarian leader Robert Mugabe, bans gay marriage. Mugabe, who was deposed in 2017, once described gay people as being “worse than pigs and dogs.” Discussing the current political climate, Hovelmeier said he is cautiously optimistic that Zimbabwe’s new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has been “far more circumspect on issues of LBGTQ rights” and who hasn’t politicized homophobia like his predecessor, may be signaling a new direction. Still, the English literature teacher knows his future in the country he loves is far from certain.
It happened fast. After meeting that September day with the head of school and faculty members, and consulting with a lawyer, Hovelmeier was advised to tell the student body he was gay at a general assembly the next morning. School officials planned to simultaneously notify parents by email. At first, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, Hovelmeier recalled. Many students stood and cheered as he spoke; others approached him afterwards with words of support. For a moment he thought he’d worried for nothing and that his bold move had struck a blow against intolerance. He even hoped he might have inspired others to feel safe and included in their school environment.
He was wrong.
Soon “a small but vocal group of parents,” he said, began demanding his dismissal. Hate messages and death threats poured in after his phone number and address were leaked to the press. Facing increasing pressure to step down, and fearing for his safety, Hovelmeier reluctantly resigned. But the pain and the anguish lingered.
“I lost 40 pounds. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. My teeth hurt from grinding them. I was suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression,” he said. “I was trying to gather the strength to convey this sense of normality, but privately I was completely shattered.”
The love and support of family and friends and a longtime Harvard initiative offered him support and hope. At the urging of a fellow writer, Hovelmeier applied to the University’s Scholars at Risk Program. “And to my absolute surprise and wonder,” he recalled, “I received an email saying that I was being offered a fellowship here at Radcliffe.”
A Radcliffe fellow, Hovelmeier is also supported by the Scholars at Risk Program, which is part of an international network of institutions and individuals devoted to protecting scholars and promoting academic freedom.
“That immediately gave me some sort of purpose, something to look forward to — the thought of being able to gather my thoughts and spend some time in what I knew would be a tonic to what had gone on,” said Hovelmeier.
Hovelmeier has spent the first months of his fellowship scouring Harvard’s libraries, part of a personal and professional quest to better understand homophobia in Africa. He hopes his research will inform both a script he is crafting for a play commissioned by the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa, and a new curriculum promoting tolerance that can be implemented in Zimbabwe’s schools.
“This work is both for my own knowledge and understanding of why Africa hasn’t been able to progress past this issue,” he said. “But it’s also helping me formulate a framework using the solid background of Harvard’s resources to argue for a change in approach, particularly in Zimbabwe.
“I am not going to go into schools and say ‘Every student should accept homosexuality,’” he said. “What is more important is to say that ‘regardless of people’s differences and views and opinions we should be engendering a culture that is at least tolerant of other people’s ways of life.’ And I think that starts with school authorities, making sure that their curriculums and ideologies are always conscious of the passive intolerance that features into much of society.”
The potential benefits, he argues, are wide-ranging. “We need to remember there is a more universal social agenda beyond Zimbabwe’s borders, and that if we are really going to produce citizens who are global, who can fit in with the world’s changing perspectives, especially if we want those students to come back to the country in future and add to its progression and its prosperity, we need to change,” he said.
Despite his experience and his desire to help change the narrative around homosexuality in his homeland, Hovelmeier doesn’t see himself as a gay activist, and he has no desire to assume such a role. In fact, if he could, he said he would simply turn back time. “I wish this whole thing had never happened and that I could be back just doing what I used to do very well in my own country, believing in a purpose that I felt was genuine.”
LGBTQ language and institutional responsibility are where it begins
But he knows he can’t change the past; he knows other young people are similarly “trapped in that homophobic environment”; and he knows that if he can prevent what happened to him from happening to anyone else, he has to try. One way forward, he said, is to return to the job he loves in the country he calls home.
“Just to be in the classroom teaching English with the knowledge of who I am, that itself is sufficient enough to actually send a message that the right way forward has been taken,” he said. “And I just feel, in principle, I need to fight for the right as a Zimbabwean citizen to get to work and contribute to the country in which I was born. I believe I am a good and principled educator, and my intention has always been to go back and argue for the right to use these abilities once again.”
Considering that we are starting a new decade while continuing to face such questions as “Are We Running Out of Trademarks?,” I thought it would be a good idea to first look at what existing trademark owners did with the trademarks they had last decade. If only because that is easier to quantify for a practitioner than existential challenges to the “assumption that there exists an inexhaustible supply of unclaimed trademarks that are at least as competitively effective as those already claimed.” The latter issue is in the capable hands of Professors Beebe (who I was lucky enough to take Trademarks with in law school) and Fromer, who along with their academic colleagues have contributed mightily to our understanding of where trademark law can and may be going in the near future. But my aims for this column are more prosaic, because I think there is still a lot we can learn from looking at the decade past at a macro level, especially in as fragmented a field as trademark litigation.
I characterize trademark litigation as “fragmented,” at least in part based on my own experiences counseling clients on different aspects of the field. At one end of the spectrum stands the anticounterfeiting work that I discussed in last week’s column, where the trademarks at issue are undoubtedly strong, and the questions of infringement and damages are readily determined. At the other end are the competitor cases, particularly those involving overlapping or otherwise contested marks, where there may be serious questions about infringement and damages. Along the way, trademark litigation can and will often involve questions of cybersquatting, or international sales, or even cases of clear-cut bullying by brand owners.
While each case presents its own challenges, both in terms of making proofs while sticking to a realistic litigation budget as well as dealing with the emotions around brand names and their reach, it is also true that trademark cases share a lot in common with other types of IP disputes. As with patent cases, for just one example, trademark litigators must be familiar with the PTO’s machinations, as well as the preferences of the particular district court the case is being litigated in. Throw in the need to work with damages and survey experts, while managing what can be very involved discovery related to damages and liability, and the similarities between trademark and patent suits come into focus. The lack of a centralized appeals court is a major difference between patents (which has the Federal Circuit) and trademarks of course, both in terms of development of the law and a perhaps greater need for local expertise in how trademark cases will run in a particular circuit’s trial courts.
Perhaps most important for trademark litigators and their clients, however, is the need to remember that the overwhelming number of disputes — no matter how just the cause or heated the disagreement — will settle. Which prioritizes the need to consider creative approaches to resolving trademark claims, the best of which are grounded in a deep understanding of the client’s true business position and goals. Getting there is often not easy, but can be very rewarding when things come together for the client’s benefit. Keep that in mind as we consider what trademark litigation looked like in the past decade.
Once again, I was fortunate to have assistance from Rachel Bailey, a former trademark litigator and Legal Data Expert at Lex Machina, who was very helpful in providing me with data from Lex Machina’s robust databases about the past decade in trademark litigation. Lex Machina defines these types of cases as “A case with one or more claims under § 43 of the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. § 1125), including trademark infringement, false designation of origin, false advertising, trademark dilution, cybersquatting, or unfair competition.” Over 44,000 filed cases met that criteria, which every year but one in the 2010s seeing over 4,000 trademark cases filed (with 2017 missing that threshold by less than 50 cases). Trademark litigation levels were relatively steady over the course of the decade, even as the past four years were on the lighter end in terms of filings. Considering the rise of mass counterfeiting cases discussed last week, as well as the continued challenges faced by brand owners in enforcing their marks, it seems likely that the number of cases will remain stable, even if we see more “informal” enforcement on online platforms like Amazon and others.
And where are these cases filed? A good 20% of the cases filed were in the entertainment/fashion/media hubs of Los Angeles and New York, followed by significant numbers of filings in Chicago, Miami, and San Francisco/Silicon Valley. Between them, the top five courts saw over a third of the filed trademark cases last decade. Which still left a significant number of cases filed across other courts nationwide, in sharp contrast to patent cases, where the top five courts usually see well over half of the filed cases. This data supports the idea that local expertise can be a difference maker in trademark cases, even if courts do not have specialized rules for those cases like you see in a lot of patent disputes.
Finally, the list of top trademark litigation filers last decade is interesting. Yes, it contains famous brand owners like Coach, Chanel, and Microsoft. But also high on the list is a super-litigious glass-bong maker known as Roor, which apparently needs to dance around the fact that marijuana-based trademarks remain illegal — at least as long as pot remains a Schedule 1 drug according to the DEA. Another entrant on the frequent filers list is Noco, which makes battery chargers and related gadgets. If anything, these less well-known filers suggest that certain companies know how to use litigation to build their brand value, while also proving that trademark litigation is not the sole province of household names. This is especially true on online platforms, where brands can rise or fall in popularity very quickly, with their rankings and page placement determined in large part by the host marketplace’s algorithms.
Thanks to the data available from Lex Machina and others, it is easier than ever to quickly get a snapshot of historical litigation activity in trademarks and other branches of IP. While the decade to come promises new and more complex challenges for brand owners than the decade that past, any insight we can get into enforcement activity on a macro level can be an important piece of input when it comes to advising clients with current needs. Whether the big battles in trademark litigation in the ’20s will be fought online or in district court is up for grabs. But we know those fights are coming, while hoping that we can help our clients win those that come their way.
Please feel free to send comments or questions to me at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or via Twitter: @gkroub. Any topic suggestions or thoughts are most welcome.
Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique, and Markman Advisors LLC, a leading consultancy on patent issues for the investment community. Gaston’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of 
Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to 
