On Tuesday, Judge Liman ordered the sealing of certain documents in Blake Lively’s ongoing lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and retaliation claims against Justin Baldoni and his production company, in connection with the filming of It Ends With Us. The parties had filed various motions to seal and unseal in connection with Lively’s motion for spoilation sanctions and defendants’ motion for summary judgment. 

Continue Reading Judge Liman: Relevance of Documents to Summary Judgment “Not a Threshold Issue” for Sealing Determinations

Earlier this month, DoorDash and Uber Eats filed a motion to preliminarily enjoin New York City’s new law requiring that online food ordering services provide an option to tip before the order is placed and to include an option for a tip of at least 10%.  According to the plaintiffs, the law compels speech that they do not wish to communicate, in violation of the First Amendment:

Continue Reading DoorDash and Uber Eats Seeks To Enjoin City Law Requiring Upfront Tipping Option

In an opinion Monday, Judge Abrams granted, in part, a motion by one insurance brokerage, Marsh & McLennan (referred to as MMA), to preliminarily enjoin a rival, Alliant, and certain employees that had left to join Alliant, from poaching clients, in violation of certain contractual non-solicitation obligations.

Judge Abrams enjoined further poaching but would not go so far as to enjoin Alliant from servicing clients that had already left because there was no “indication that MMA’s lost clients would return” if an injunction issued and because, even if MMA were to ultimately prove the client defections resulted from contractual breaches or tortious behavior, the appropriate remedy would be damages (even potentially punitive damages), not a preliminary injunction:

Continue Reading In Corporate Raiding Case, Judge Abrams Enjoins Poaching Clients But Not Servicing Ones That Have Already Left

In an Order last week, Judge McMahon asked the lawyers in a copyright infringement case over the young adult book series Crave (see the operative complaint here) how they planned to conduct a forthcoming jury trial, given the massive volume of evidence—both the book series itself and, separately, the plaintiff’s unpublished manuscripts from which the series was allegedly stolen.

The case was filed by family law attorney and aspiring novelist Lynn Freeman who for years sought to publish her book Blue Moon Rising. After having failed to find a publisher, she came across a book, Crave by Tracy Wolff, with striking similarities. Wolff, it turned out, had the same literary agent as Freeman. Freeman would later sue for copyright infringement. (For more case background, see the New Yorker’s feature on the case).

Judge Stanton denied summary judgment, agreeing with Magistrate Judge Netburn’s report and recommendation that there were fact issues about whether Wolff had access to Freeman’s manuscripts (via their common agent) and whether Wolff “copied parts, large or small.”

The case was assigned to Judge McMahon, who initially suggested that the parties agree to a bench trial because, among other things, it would make it easier to manage the volume of evidence: “I promise I will read everything that either side wants to submit to a trier of fact — all the books, all the notes and all the drafts.”

The parties’ decision to proceed with a jury trial is what gave rise to last week’s Order, and Judge McMahon’s query on how to present the evidence. As Judge McMahon explained, it would not suffice for the manuscripts by Freeman or the Crave series itself to be admitted into evidence merely by way of summaries:

Continue Reading In Case Over Allegedly Infringing Teen Romance Book Series, Judge McMahon Asks Counsel: How To Efficiently Try A Case With 10,000-Plus Pages Of Allegedly Infringing Material?

In an MDL brought by private plaintiffs challenging Google’s allegedly monopolistic digital advertising practices, Judge Castel ruled on Monday that Google was precluded from relitigating issues decided in an April bench trial ruling in the Eastern District of Virginia. The Virginia case involved similar monopolization allegations, but was brought by DOJ and state attorneys general.

Judge Castel found that the elements for issue preclusion were met — that is, that the Virginia case involved the same issues, that Google had a fair chance to litigate the issues, and that they were necessary to a final judgment — but noted that issue preclusion, as an equitable doctrine, required him to also consider the overall fairness of binding a litigant to adverse findings from another case.

On that point, Judge Castel found “no unfairness to Google” in applying issue preclusion, especially given the “massively high stakes” of the Virginia case:

Continue Reading Judge Castel: Google Barred From Relitigating Issues Decided In DOJ Digital Ad Monopoly Case

On Wednesday, Reddit Inc. sued Perplexity AI and three “data scrapers,” alleging the companies are circumventing its technological safeguards to unlawfully acquire Reddit’s copyrighted data to “feed” Perplexity’s artificial intelligence model.

Reddit is one of the largest online discussion platforms in the world and “comprises nearly two decades of human conversational data organized across interest-based, user-created communities (referred to as “subreddits”) spanning subjects on virtually every topic imaginable.” According to Reddit, this human-generated content is “widely seen as invaluable to AI companies,” who require a consistent source of new data to “train and operate their AI products.” Reddit “does not permit unauthorized commercialization of Reddit content absent an express agreement with guardrails in place to ensure that Reddit and its users’ rights are protected.”

Continue Reading Reddit Sues Perplexity AI and Data Scrapers for “Industrial-Scale” Theft of “Valuable Copyrighted Content”

On Tuesday, Judge Kaplan awarded approximately $500,000 attorneys’ fees, under a contractual fee-shifting provision, to a defendant that won a motion to dismiss and defended the win on appeal. The plaintiff had sought to rescind certain transactions as inconsistent with the securities laws, but the defendant successfully moved to dismiss the complaint back in February 2024. The Court declined to rule on defendant’s motion for contractually-mandated attorneys’ fees until the appeal was finalized. After the Second Circuit affirmed the dismissal in August, the defendant renewed its motion, based on agreements between the parties that provided for “reasonable attorney’s fees and costs” in any litigation.

Continue Reading Judge Kaplan Gives 20% Haircut To Attorneys’ Fees For Appeal, Finding 100 Hours For Argument Prep “Lavish” 

Earlier today, Judge Vargas dismissed Drake’s defamation suit against his recording company of 20 years, UMG Recordings, Inc., stemming from “perhaps the most infamous rap battle in the genre’s history, the vitriolic war of words that erupted between superstar recording artists Aubrey Drake Graham (‘Drake’) and Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (‘Lamar’ or ‘Kendrick Lamar’) in the spring of 2024.” Drake alleged that UMG intentionally published and promoted Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us,” which accused Drake of being a pedophile, while knowing the accusations were false and defamatory.

The court held that “Not Like Us” was “nonactionable opinion” and therefore not defamatory. The deciding factor of the analysis was “the overall context in which the assertions were made”:

Continue Reading Judge Vargas: Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” is Nonactionable Opinion

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On Thursday, Judge Ho largely denied the motions for summary judgment of three fertility-services-related defendants against negligence claims stemming from the failed freezing of unfertilized eggs (oocytes). In 2014, Plaintiff Larisa Lev-Ary underwent a medical procedure to extract and store her oocytes. Sixteen of these oocytes were deemed viable and subsequently frozen until 2021, when they were thawed for fertilization. At that time, it was discovered that the oocytes “were all destroyed and unusable.”

In a matter of first impression, the Court asked whether the alleged breaches gave rise to ordinary negligence or medical malpractice claims:

The Court has been unable to identify any cases that directly address the precise question presented here—i.e., whether claims arising from the act of freezing oocytes sound in medical malpractice or in ordinary negligence. But the principle articulated by the New York Court of Appeals in Weiner—that claims arising from acts that are “not linked to the medical treatment of a particular patient” sound in ordinary negligence—compels the conclusion that Ms. Levy-Ary’s claim against AFS arising from the freezing of her oocytes do not sound in medical malpractice. True, freezing oocytes is certainly related to medical treatments, as it follows one medical treatment (the retrieval of the oocytes) and may precede another one (e.g., implantation of an embryo). But that is also true of the testing of donated blood for infectious diseases, which similarly follows one medical treatment (the drawing of blood), and may precede another one (e.g., transfusion)—and the Court of Appeals nevertheless concluded that blood testing is not an act “linked” to such treatment for purposes of determining whether a claim falls within the realm of medical malpractice. Similarly, here, the act of freezing oocytes itself is not “linked to the medical treatment of a particular patient,” and therefore claims arising from that act do not sound in medical malpractice.

In its decision, the Court declined to extend the holding of Bledsoe v. Ctr. for Hum. Reprod., 207 N.Y.S.3d 519, 521 (App. Div. 1st Dept. 2024). Bledsoe held that “preparing” eggs to be frozen “would fall within the realm of medical malpractice,” based on the “special skills” required. In contrast, the alleged action here was not “preparing” the oocytes to be frozen, but rather the “actual act of freezing” them. Absent controlling authority from the New York Court of Appeals, the Court explained that Appellate Division decisions were merely “helpful indicators,” and that the Court of Appeals’ statement in Weiner was “the clearest relevant guidance” given that the allegations in this matter were not based on the preparation of the oocytes.

The case is 23 Civ. 05504.