Gregory P. Joseph* The Supreme Court has rewritten the law governing the availability of U.S. discovery procedures to gather evidence for use in proceedings abroad, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §1782(a). In Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., 124 S.Ct. 2466, 159 L.Ed.2d 355 (2004), the Supreme ...

Gregory P. Joseph* Recent attorney-client privilege decisions from the First and Second Circuits reflect that there is vitality in the generally disfavored doctrine of limited waiver — even in jurisdictions that have historically been cool to the concept. The opinions in In re Grand Jury Proceedings ...

Gregory P. Joseph* There are several important rulemaking initiatives percolating through the Advisory Committees of the U.S. Judicial Conference. The Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure will be considering several of them next month. This article summarizes a number of the most important co ...

Gregory P. Joseph The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the "Reform Act" or "Act" or "PSLRA") was passed with much fanfare, over Presidential veto, on December 22, 1995. It was designed to enact new barriers to securities fraud actions - procedural bars and substantive safe harbors - in addition to all preexisting leg ...

Gregory P. Joseph Electronic discovery injects difficult, expensive and contentious issues into many otherwise routine disputes. In 1999, the American Bar Association adopted Civil Discovery Standards that included provisions addressing preservation duties and cost shifting in relation to electronic discovery. Those standards have be ...

Gregory P. Joseph* The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure change with telephone directory. Every year, something is tweaked, torn, wrenched or re-written. Most of this is merely annoying. Sometimes, though, buried amidst the clutter, is an amendment that carries a real wallop for major a ...

Gregory P. Joseph* Effective December 1, 2003, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, which governs class actions, will be significantly amended, absent Congressional legislation to prevent it. The amendments incorporate several substantial changes to the original proposals that were circulated for public comment in 2001 and analyzed in ...

Gregory P. Joseph* Effective December 1, 2003, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, which governs class actions, has been significantly amended. The final amendments incorporated several substantial changes to the original proposals that were circulated for public comment in 2001 (analy ...

Gregory P. Joseph* Sanctions jurisprudence has infiltrated many aspects of practice and directly affects how cases are litigated, as reflected in recent columns dealing with Electronic Spoliation (12/9/02) and Expert Spoliation (2/3/03). This column summarizes several significant sanctions decisions of the past eighteen months in a v ...

Gregory P. Joseph* The corporate fraud legislation signed into law on July 30, 2002, is largely focused not on civil litigation but on corporate governance, disclosure and criminal law matters. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is, however, a telling example of the law ofunintended consequences. It will have wide-ranging effects on secu ...