Back on February 5, I posted on Judge Mazzant’s January 16 decision concluding that the Texas Anti-SLAPP statute did not apply in federal court. This afternoon Westlaw published a report and recommendation by a magistrate judge issued the day before which granted an Anti-SLAPP motion. When I checked to see if it was still in effect, I saw that it had been withdrawn, but had generated a show cause order and a flurry of briefing that I thought readers might be interested in regarding counsel’s duty of candor to the court.
Grayson in the demo’ed building with some of the 1897 shelving stacked for reuse as trim and, later, furniture. Compare to Mose Weisman in photo below.
As readers know, I do a bit of woodworking from time to time, especially since I inherited the half a linear mile or so of 100+ year old original growth pine shelving in the old Hub Shoe Store that we renovated into my law offices in 2009-2010.
I’ve built shelves and book racks with details based on the store’s original storage cabinets, as well as a couple dozen handmade photo frames with giclees of an original painting of a local jury box for the board members my year as chair of the State Bar’s Litigation Section.
Hub 001 & 002 – book racks
The latest project is a slant-top stand I use for reading and editing documents, both on paper and on my iPad.
The handmade frames for my LitSec board colleagues turned out to be quite a project
Hub 003 – shelves (shown under construction)
Review stand prototype with parts cut for two improved versions (with photobomb by a piece of lawn furniture I was painting at the time)
The photo at top of the post shows the first prototype in the background, with the two second prototypes in the foreground. I stained them differently to match the Kariels’ two desks in the old store, which we still use in one of the attorney offices on the visiting side.
In order to use them both as a slant-top editing desk and a copy stand I designed them with different slopes on the back so you can use them as both – just flip them 180 degrees. I resized the surface to accommodate not just iPads and papers, but Circa notebooks, since that’s how many of the documents I work with are bound.
Hub Shoe Store founder Mose Weisman shortly after store opened in 1897 – see shoe stand at right.
Interestingly, this photo of the original owner of the Hub Shoe Store Mose Weisman in the store shortly after its opening in 1897 shows something fairly similar at right, which appears to be a stand for displaying a shoe.
I like the stands because they eliminate glare and make it easier to read documents both because of the angle and because they seem to hit the sweet spot for my reading/computer glasses. But I still plan to build another set with improved dimensions, finish, and “pencil rail” design.
The ground rules for when stays are available when an IPR has been filed are fairly well established locally, but occasionally a new fact crops up and requires analysis, or a court provides an updated analysis of the issue. Such was the case here.
I was just talking with a nonlawyer who observed that what we do in litigation must be like playing a game of chess. I thought about it, and told them it’s more like playing the old Operation board game on a stagecoach.
More and more recent patent cases involve patents a party declares are essential to practice a standard. As was recently the situation in a case in Tyler, sometimes a party asks a jury to determine whether a party holding standard-essential patents complied with its obligations in its negotiations. In this case, the plaintiff asked the Court to declare that it had not breached its obligation to offer a license on FRAND, i.e. fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory, terms. In other words, was its offer FRAND?
