First Step Last Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee approved that portion of the 2022 budget legislation with which it was tasked by the Congressional Budget resolution of August 24. The text of the bill prepared by the Committee – almost nine hundred pages long – was passed along party lines, except for one …
Read More

September.  Synonymous with back to school, the end of summer, and the start of the NFL season.  And while the Cowboys and Bucs kicked off the season this year, another epic battle was brewing out west in the corridors of the Ninth Circuit. The public policy in most states is to enforce arbitration agreements in …
Read More

Living the Dream “How was your weekend?” Thank you for asking. Awful.[i] “Why?” you ask. (Humor me. Pretend you’re interested.) I’ll tell you. One word, with 535 syllables: Congress.[ii] When the reconciliation budget resolutions were passed by the Senate and then the House,[iii] the committees to which reconciliation instructions were given were also directed “to …
Read More

Summertime in Washington On August 11, the Senate passed the $3.5 trillion budget resolution for the 2021-2022 fiscal year – S. Con. Res. 14, as amended – by a vote of 50 to 49, strictly along party lines, including Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema who have repeatedly questioned the wisdom of such an expensive measure. …
Read More

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was first beginning to take hold, the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) issued a report on insurance fraud that highlighted the fact that suspected no-fault automobile insurance fraud accounted for 59 percent of the 25,985 insurance fraud reports that the DFS’s Insurance Frauds Bureau received …
Read More

On August 31, 2021, the FBI and CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) issued Alert AA21-243A, warning that there is an increased risk to U.S. entities of an “impactful ransomware attack” over Labor Day Weekend. A summary of the risk and suggested steps to address it can be found at https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/current-activity/2021/08/31/fbi-cisa-advisory-ransomware-awareness-holidays-and-weekends. The Alert can be …
Read More

Court Declines To Rescind Policy Based On Issues Of Fact As To Materiality Of Alleged Misrepresentations Union Mutual disclaimed coverage for a fire loss at its insured’s restaurant and sought to rescind its policy based upon the insured’s alleged misrepresentations in its application that it did not have “open flame cooking” or a Single Room …
Read More

Report Card A couple of weeks ago, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) released a report that presented the results of its review to determine whether the IRS’s “policies, procedures and, practices” adequately ensured that its examiners were considering the compensation paid by closely held S corporations to those shareholders who rendered service …
Read More

Here is what you will find in our August Insurance Update: Pollution Exclusion Bars Coverage for Criminal Proceeding Over Submission of Fraudulent Coal-Dust Samples, Sixth Circuit Affirms Fifth Circuit Finds Insurer Has Duty to Defend Insured for a Data Breach Litigation Under Policy’s Personal and Advertising Coverage Warranty Exclusion Bars D&O Liability Coverage for Claim …
Read More

The New York Court of Appeals’ past term was as unusual a term as practitioners and judges ever could have imagined. Of course, COVID-19 continued to affect the Court’s operations. On top of that, the early retirement of Judge Paul Feinman, followed by his untimely death, the subsequent retirement of Judge Leslie Stein, and the …
Read More

Welcome to the Governor’s office, Ms. Hochul. Unfortunately, congratulations are hardly in order; indeed, a wish for good luck seems much more appropriate. I suppose you realize that the last round of tax legislation, enacted in April by the Democratic-controlled Assembly and Senate – veto-proof super majorities in both Chambers – resulted in a tax …
Read More

Social media has played an oversized role in lawsuits under state and local biometric privacy laws, including especially the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). See, e.g., Thornley v. Clearview AI, Inc., 984 F.3d 1241 (7th Cir. 2021) (plaintiffs alleged that defendant used a proprietary algorithm to “scrape” pictures from social media sites such as …
Read More

The Calm Before? I’m confused.[i] For better or worse, I’m pretty sure that I am not alone. Last week, in a letter addressed to the American people, forty-six of the fifty Republicans in the U.S. Senate indicated they would not vote in favor of increasing the federal debt ceiling to accommodate the additional spending that …
Read More

Compare and Contrast Have you spoken to anybody about the infrastructure bill on which the Senate is about to vote? I know I haven’t, except to explain that Speaker Pelosi has stated the House will not consider the bill unless and until the Senate also adopts a budget resolution for the President’s tax and spending …
Read More

In April 2020, in an article entitled, “Coronavirus and Statutes of Limitations in New York: A Lingering Effect?”, we discussed Governor Cuomo’s Executive Order 202.8, issued in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. We opined that, based on its language, it served to “toll,” rather than “suspend,” New York’s limitation periods.[1] On June 2, …
Read More