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Working for a startup can come with a lot of perks including flexibility and a fun environment. But when a VC invests to the point where it can push out your startup’s founder, you might want to consider reviewing the situation. While the research shows that companies that are doing well to begin with go on to be even more successful when a founder is replaced with someone who actually has business acumen, a founder getting axed from their own company is a rather ominous sign of things to come for that relaxed environment....

In a securities fraud action, dismissal of the complaint is reversed where the limited partnership units at issue were securities within the meaning of the Securities Exchange Act because, having taken advantage of the corporate form to purchase the limited partnership units, defendants could not disregard that form to avoid liability for the same transaction. Read Liberty Prop. Trust v. Republic Props. Corp., No. 08-7095 Appellate Information Argued May 12, 2009...

We’re living in the information age, and there is probably no bigger online information-sharing forum than Facebook. So it was that Springfield resident Dustin Barnes, a knowledgeable man with vital knowledge to share, took to Facebook to instruct others in the modern art of ankle monitor removal. “This is how you take an ankle bracelet off,” Barnes elucidated in a Facebook video already viewed by thousands, “without breaking the circuit.” And while uploading educational materials to the internet might not be a crime itself, tampering with electronic monitoring equipment is a felony in the state of Missouri....

A year ago today, NYPD officers arrested Atlanta Hawks forward Thabo Sefolosha and teammate Pero Antic outside a club in the Chelsea neighborhood. Police threw Sefolosha to the ground and placed him in cuffs so forcefully he broke his tibia and suffered ligament damage in his right leg. Now Sefolosha is suing the NYPD and the five officers who arrested him, claiming extensive injuries and damages based on false arrest, excessive force, and malicious prosecution....

On the heels of the recent concussion controversy for collegiate and professional football players, numerous lawsuits have been filed by former college football players against the NCAA and their respective colleges. The lawsuits allege that the students suffered injuries as a result of their concussions being improperly handled by the school’s coaching and athletics personnel. This past July, a federal judge granted preliminary approval to a $75 million class action settlement against the NCAA for their mishandling of concussions....

Over the past year, few have fought as hard or as vocally against daily fantasy websites as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Schneiderman’s office was among the first to begin investigating sites like DraftKings and FanDuel, and soon the AG was demanding that the sites stop taking New Yorkers’ money and even return money they had accepted previously. But the icy relationship between NY and DFS may be warming a bit....

It looks like the NFL labor situation is right back where it started. The NFL Players Association has sued the NFL for collusion, claiming that it imposed a secret salary cap during the 2010 season. That season, per the prior collective bargaining agreement, was supposed to be uncapped. But the union claims that the teams and the league illegally agreed to impose a $123 million per-club salary cap. Representatives also claim the Redskins, Cowboys, Raiders and Saints did not abide by the agreement and were subsequently punished....

The first rule of Toddler Fight Club: Don’t Snapchat Toddler Fight Club. The second rule of Toddler Fight Club: DO NOT SNAPCHAT TODDLER FIGHT CLUB. Apparently two day care workers couldn’t follow these simple rules, and now they face child abuse charges. The women were busted after sharing an organized kid fight video on social media, possibly as part of Project Mayhem. The Things You Record End up Recording You New Jersey women Erica Kenny and Chanese White instigated and videotaped fights between a dozen boys and girls, aged four to six....

When asked how far she would go for her dream wedding, Lori Stilley might answer ‘I’d fake cancer for it.’ That’s what the New Jersey woman is accused of, based on police charges. There is no crime for ‘inappropriate-devotion-to-your-wedding’ so prosecutors have charged her with theft for all the money she allegedly took from friends and family. In February 2011 Stilley told family and friends that she had stage 3 bladder cancer....

A small business owner has recently opened a nude maid service in Lubbock, Texas. But cops in the area aren’t smiling at the young woman’s attempt to get more customers. Melissa Borrett, 26, says her house-cleaning business, Fantasy Maid Service, is just that: a business that cleans homes, nothing more. However, officers in the conservative West Texas city say Borrett might not be in full compliance with local laws. So how much will it cost you to have this naked maid clean up your pad?...

Will a circumcision ban in San Francisco make, eh, the final cut and appear before city voters in November? Where else, other than San Francisco, would such a question even be posed to voters? Lloyd Schofield, the man spear-heading the effort to outlaw male circumcision in the city, claims to have already collected more than half of the required signatures for a petition to put the issue up for a popular vote on the city’s November ballot....

Everyone knows about Pokemon Go by now. It’s an augmented reality game that can be downloaded on a phone and played at home and in the world. Players try to catch colorful cartoon characters by luring them or going out to hunt them down. The game has been received very enthusiastically by many and is being downloaded in record numbers. But like any cultural phenomenon, however positive it may seem, there are downsides....

Do sperm donors have to pay child support? If Kansas authorities get their way, that may be the case. Four years ago, William Marotta donated sperm to a lesbian couple after answering an online ad. A baby girl was born, and now the donor is suddenly faced with a child support bill, reports the Associated Press. Marotta said that when he answered the ad and donated his sperm, he reached an agreement with the lesbian couple that he would waive all of his parental rights and financial obligations, writes the AP....

The Federal Trade Commission released a study of “Patent Assertion Entities” last week, which provides one of the most comprehensive overviews of PAEs, or, as they’re popularly known, patent trolls, based on five years of non-public PAE data. The FTC’s study confirms what most of us have long known: patent trolls be trollin’. But the study doesn’t just name the problem; the Commission also has recommendations on how to bring patent trolls to heel....

Good news for incoming students at UMass Law: Massachusetts’ only public law school has won provisional ABA accreditation, and is freezing tuition and fees for the next three years. For the school, provisional accreditation by the American Bar Association marks “a major milestone,” the University of Massachusetts’ president said in a statement. For students, it marks a major expansion of their potential legal career options. Without ABA accreditation, UMass Law graduates could only sit for the bar exam in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Boston Globe reports....

What would you do for $55 grand? Would you crash your car two dozen times? How about if it was a crime? A man in Utah claimed 23 car accidents in the last 5 years to collect on insurance and now he’s collecting criminal charges, according to the Associated Press. Navid Monjazeb got over $55,000 from insurance carriers over 5 years. Now he has added criminal charges to his collection and he is looking at 12 counts of insurance fraud, 2 counts of forgery, 7 counts of reckless endangerment, and a pattern of unlawful activity after making allegedly false claims....

No matter what you think of Prop 65, the voters of California passed it. That means that when a company sells or exposes California consumers to something known to the state of California to be a cancer or birth defect causing agent, those companies have to warn consumers. Sounds like a good law for consumers, and a relatively difficult and burdensome one for businesses. But recently, this mainstay of California consumer protection has been in the national spotlight due to the fact that a judge ruled a few months back that coffee companies are required to provide the prop 65 warnings for coffee because coffee contains one of the California “known cancer causing ingredients....

Get it together, Boalt. Thanks to your unruly deans, you’re now top of the law school charts, at least when it comes to your deans and sexual harassment scandals. The newest news of U.C. Berkeley School of Law’s handsy deans came on Tuesday, when an executive assistant sued Boalt Dean Sujit Choudhry for sexual harassment. Choudhry himself became dean just a few years after a previous dean left the school over – surprise, surprise – sexual harassment....

Under the Takings Clause, the government is not allowed to take individual property for the benefit of the public without just compensation. What constitutes “a taking” has been the subject of debate since the very beginning … The Federal Circuit just affirmed a lower District court’s decision that a salmonella warning does not amount to a government “taking.” The lawyers who represented the growers in this case were really reaching on this one....

PhilaLawyer speaks to the prelaws, systematically destroying the dream and asking, does the legal profession have a real future?On a related note, End of Esquire suggests an addition to the 1L curriculum, sort of a Scared Straight for would-be lawyers: required office internships.In the WSJ, Elizabeth Wurtzel laments the disappearance of twelve years’ worth of wealth. Plus, we think she equates the corporate culture of BigLaw to the moral bankruptcy of Wall Street....