Binding Precedent - a Blog

Clients form an entity, receive a certificate, and treat personal liability protection as a completed transaction. It is not. The shield is maintained through conduct, and the conduct that dissolves it is ordinary rather than exotic. The Good! Courts do not pierce the veil casually. Pennsylvania applies a “strong presumption” against it, and the Supreme Court has cautioned against any approach that would render the corporate form useless. Lumax Industries, Inc. v. Aultman, 54

Pennsylvania quietly replaced one of the most forgiving compliance regimes in the country with one that has teeth. If you own a Pennsylvania entity, the grace period is ending, and the penalty is not a fine. Under Act 122 of 2022, Pennsylvania eliminated the decennial report, a filing due once every ten years, and replaced it with an annual report. Nearly every domestic and foreign filing association is covered: corporations, LLCs, limited partnerships, limited liability part

Clients increasingly arrive at a first meeting having already “researched” the matter with an AI chatbot. They typed in the facts, described the dispute, sometimes pasted an email from a prior lawyer, and asked what to do. It feels private. You are typing alone into a window, the way you might write in a journal. It is not private. In February 2026 a NY federal court held for the first time that a defendant’s exchanges with a consumer AI chatbot were protected by neither the

Ask a collector who has just bought a painting in London or Paris what the export license is for, and you will often hear some version of the same answer: it is bureaucracy standing between me and the thing I paid for. That framing is wrong, and acting on it is expensive. The license does not itself determine title. In practical terms, it documents lawful export and can materially affect the object's marketability and mobility. What the License is Actually Doing Every market

For years, owners treated small business cybersecurity as a technical problem: install antivirus software, choose strong passwords, and hope the backup works. In 2026, that approach is (massively) incomplete. A cyber incident can trigger state data-breach notices, federal regulatory scrutiny, contract claims, litigation expense, business interruption, and lost customer goodwill. The hard part is that no single U.S. cybersecurity law covers every business. The rules depend on

It usually arrives by certified mail and email on the same afternoon, on letterhead, addressed to you and copied to your new employer. It recites your non-compete, asserts that you are violating it, demands that you resign your new position immediately, and gives you a deadline measured in days. It threatens injunctive relief, damages, and attorney’s fees. Two reactions are equally dangerous: panic and dismissal. A demand letter is an opening position, not a court order, and

Ask a small-business owner to name their biggest legal risk and few will say “how I classify my workers.” They should. Worker misclassification, treating someone as an independent contractor who is legally an employee, is quietly the most dangerous exposure many small businesses carry right now, and a recent shift in the law has made it more dangerous, not less. Federal enforcement has eased. State enforcement, especially in New Jersey, has not. Owners who read the federal he

When a company’s chatbot promises a refund the company never offered, when an AI agent signs a deal no human reviewed, or when an automated system misleads a customer, the instinct is understandable: blame the machine. “The AI did it by itself” sounds like it should shift responsibility away from the business. In civil litigation, it does not. Across contract, tort, and consumer-protection law, that argument likely fails, and for the same underlying reason each time. This blo

Your website is a business asset, and AI companies are hungry for the content on it. Whether you want your pages used to train models, surfaced in AI search, or left alone, the tools that express and enforce that choice are partly technical and partly legal, and the law around them is unsettled and actively litigated. Start with robots.txt. It is a plain text file at the root of your domain that tells automated crawlers which parts of the site they may access. It is the stand

Employers are quietly running resumes through AI screeners, using chatbots to interview, and letting software flag performance. That is efficient, and it is now a regulated activity in a growing number of states, including Illinois. Effective January 1, 2026, Illinois House Bill 3773 (Public Act 103-0804) amended the Illinois Human Rights Act (775 ILCS 5/2-102) to address AI in employment head-on. The amendment makes two things a civil rights violation. First, using AI that h

Comprehensive data privacy law is no longer a California curiosity. Roughly twenty states now have one, and New Jersey’s is among the broadest. If your business collects data from New Jersey residents, the New Jersey Data Privacy Act (N.J.S.A. 56:8-166.4 et seq.) likely already applies to you. The Act took effect January 15, 2025. It reaches any business that operates in New Jersey or targets New Jersey residents and meets one of two thresholds: processing the data of at leas

The federal effort to ban noncompete agreements is over, at least by rule. On February 12, 2026, the FTC formally removed its Non-Compete Clause Rule from the Code of Federal Regulations, and 16 C.F.R. Part 910 no longer exists. The 2024 rule that would have voided tens of millions of agreements never took effect: a Texas court set it aside, the agency withdrew its appeals, and it has now cleared the books entirely. That does not make noncompetes safe to use freely. Two thing

If you buy or sell collectibles on Whatnot, eBay, COMC, or any large platform, a federal law is quietly shaping the transaction, and many serious collectors do not know they now fall under it. The INFORM Consumers Act (15 U.S.C. § 45f) requires online marketplaces to collect, verify, and in some cases disclose identifying information about “high-volume third-party sellers.” A seller crosses that threshold at 200 or more transactions and $5,000 or more in gross revenue in a co

Generative AI has made it trivial to clone a voice or a face. The law is scrambling to catch up, and the leading federal response is moving. On June 18, 2026, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced the NO FAKES Act of 2026 (S. 4591) and sent it to the full Senate. A revised version had been introduced weeks earlier with bipartisan backing. It is not law yet, and it may still change, but it is closer than any prior effort. What it would do. The bill creates a fede

The most consequential intellectual property question of the decade, whether training artificial intelligence on copyrighted works is fair use, is heading toward the federal appellate courts. The Third Circuit, which covers New Jersey and Pennsylvania, is near the front of the line. The trial-level decisions have split. In Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, a Delaware federal court granted partial summary judgment to Thomson Reuters in early 2025, holding that copying West

Startups sign SaaS agreements all day without reading them and usually get away with it. AI vendor contracts are different, because what you hand over is not just money. It is your data, your prompts, and sometimes your product’s core inputs. The clauses that look like boilerplate are where founders quietly give away rights they will want back at diligence. Four issues deserve real attention before you sign. Data and input rights. Many AI vendors reserve the right to use cust

The collectibles market runs on trust in a plastic slab. A tamper-resistant holder with a grade is supposed to guarantee that an item is authentic and accurately assessed. Increasingly, the holders themselves are the forgery. In January 2026, a federal jury in the Southern District of New York convicted a defendant of wire fraud for selling sports and Pokémon cards bearing counterfeit grades that purported to come from a leading authentication service. He is not alone. Invest

For collectors, third-party grading is the difference between a card and an asset. A numbered grade in a sealed holder sets price, liquidity, and trust. That is why the consolidation of the grading industry now drawing antitrust scrutiny matters well beyond the hobby. Collectors Holdings, which owns PSA, acquired competitor SGC in February 2024 and Beckett Grading Services in December 2025. According to a proposed class action, those deals left the combined company controllin

If you employ people in more than one state, start here: the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Bivens v. Zep, Inc. should not change a word of your harassment policy. Build to the strictest standard that can reach you, and the circuit split below becomes someone else’s problem. The split is real. In Bivens v. Zep, Inc., 147 F.4th 635 (6th Cir. 2025), the court held that an employer is liable under Title VII for harassment by a customer or other non-employee only if the employer “de

Clients sometimes ask for a “quick review” or a “skim” of a contract before signing. It is an understandable request. Unfortunately, it is also one a careful lawyer cannot simply grant. The duty to review an agreement in full is NOT for billing purposes. It flows from the rules that govern how lawyers are required to work. Start with competence. In Pennsylvania and New York, the ethic rules governing attorneys provide a familiar formulation: competent representation requires