Articles

04.24.12

Planning to Manage the Renewable Generation Gap: the 'Nudge' vs. the 'Shove'

Manatt partner David Huard, chair of the firm’s Energy, Environment and Natural Resources practice group, authored an article, “Planning to Manage the Renewable Generation Gap: the ‘Nudge’ vs. the ‘Shove’,” for the September 17, 2010, edition of BNA Daily ...


04.24.12

Health Reform Accelerates Changes in the Pharmaceutical Industry

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act makes major changes to the Medicare prescription drug benefit, reducing drug costs for many seniors and increasing rebates and other costs for industry. Although these changes will affect prescription drug costs and pharmaceutical companies’ ...


04.24.12

The Best Defense May Be a Good Offense

Defending a class action lawsuit poses great risk and uncertainty for a corporate defendant. A single plaintiff, whose claims may be worth only a pittance standing alone, can represent the claims of every corporate customer over a period of several years. If the court refuses to certify the class, ...


04.23.12

Is Anyone Not a Foreign Official Under the FCPA?

Recent years have seen a rise in the number of enforcement actions taken by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), as well as a notable expansion of the types of conduct covered by these prosecutions. ...


04.23.12

New Trend in Sustainable HIEs: Fair Share Financial Support

CMS recently solidified a new trend in electronic health information exchange sustainability: requiring all stakeholders who stand to benefit from electronic HIE to share in a portion of its costs. It seems like common sense, but a scan of HIE initiatives reveals that HIE traditionally has been ...


04.23.12

Giving Meaningful Use Time to Settle In

The news coming from the "meaningful use" frontlines in recent weeks is like the opening line of "A Tale of Two Cities." The May 26 announcement that Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was the first hospital to receive a Medicare meaningful use (MU) incentive ...


04.23.12

California's New Apportionment Rules for Multistate Taxpayers

Over the past two years, the California legislature has enacted significant changes in California tax law, including a substantial modification to California’s apportionment rules (New Apportionment Rules) used to determine California-source business income, for franchise and income tax ...


04.23.12

Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

The enactment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the "Dodd-Frank Act") on July 21, 2010 presents unique challenges for Boards of Directors of community banks. In particular, in the absence of regulations which have yet to be implemented, each community bank ...


04.23.12

Private Funding of Energy Efficiency Retrofits

Although government, environmentalists and fiscal hawks rarely agree on environmental issues, a new public-private partnership to finance U.S. energy efficiency retrofits (the “Retrofit Program”) is attracting broad public support. The Retrofit Program is being funded by a private ...


04.23.12

The NAD Sets Precedent for Others in Media, Marketing

In the midst of the current debate regarding behavioral advertising and the industry's strong desire for a self-regulatory approach, it is useful to look at the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus as a model for successful self-regulation.