Carol A. Hyde, a founding partner of Iseman, Cunningham, Riester & Hyde, LLP, a law firm with offices in Poughkeepsie and Albany, was elected the firm’s first managing partner at the partners’ annual planning retreat held in January.

The firm was formerly managed by a three-person executive committee.
Hyde practices in the areas of health care and business transactions.

A native of Michigan, Hyde earned her general studies degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and graduated magna cum laude from Albany Law School of Union University, where she was co-valedictorian of her class.

Two Richmond law firms are expanding their reach through a merger.

LeClairRyan and Wright Robinson Osthimer & Tatum are planning to merge March 31 in a deal that will broaden their national scope and add to their capacity to handle large, complex cases, partners with the firms said yesterday.

The combined firm will use the LeClairRyan name, and no job cuts are expected.

LeClairRyan said the merger would expand its litigation practice in product liability, construction, employment and the aviation industry, and provide its clients more representation on the East and West coasts.

"It gives us a greater depth and breadth of services," said Gary D. LeClair, the firm's chairman and chief executive officer.

Founded in 1988, the firm has 220 lawyers and about 225 other staff members at several offices in Virginia and in Boston; Philadelphia; Newark, N.J.; Washington; New York; and Rochester, N.Y.

Wright Robinson Osthimer & Tatum has 50 lawyers and 50 other staff members, as well as about 120 contract lawyers in the Richmond area. The firm, founded in 1986, has offices in Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington.

It also has built a practice in "discovery solutions," which involve litigation that includes millions of pages of documents or large amounts of data that require technological solutions to organize.

"We were one of the first firms in the country to really have a standardized practice group to do this," said Mark Yacano, a principal at Wright Robinson. "One of the driving reasons for this merger was the fact that LeClairRyan wanted to partner with us to continue to grow it."

The discovery solutions practice is at the firm's office on East Franklin Street in Richmond. It will stay there, while some Wright Robinson Osthimer & Tatum lawyers will move to LeClairRyan's offices in Riverfront Plaza.

Today, domain hunter Chris McElory chucked a federal class action lawsuit at Network Solutions, insisting that the Comcast of domain registrars uses "fraudulent and deceptive business practices to effectively trap consumers into paying its grossly inflated domain name registrations fees".

In the words of Brian Kabateck, one of McElory's lawyers, Network Solutions is guilty of "a very sophisticated form of price fixing". We take issue with the "very sophisticated" bit.

If you visit the Network Solutions website and show interest in a domain without actually putting your money down, the company will quickly register the address under its own name. For the next four days, you can still purchase the address from Network Solutions, but you can't purchase it from any other registrar.

Back in January, for instance, one loyal Reg reader searched the site for "network-solutions-registers-all-names-searched.com," and minutes later, he discovered that "network-solutions-registers-all-names-searched" belonged to none other than Network Solutions. Meanwhile, other readers have pulled this trick with domain names that describe the company's behavior in very different terms.

Though it won't speak to us, Networks Solutions tells others that by self-registering domains, it's protecting customers from cybersquatters on the lookout for highly marketable urls. "In response to customer concerns about Domain Name Front Running (domains being registered by someone else just after they have conducted a domain name search)," the company has said, "we have implemented a security measure to protect our customers."

So, Network Solutions is front running domains in an effort to prevent other outfits from front running. And judging from a recent ICANN study, those other outfits don't exist.

And even if they do exist, Network Solutions' little trick doesn't prevent them from front-running. It merely forces them to spend their dirty dollars with Network Solutions. Network Solutions claims that it would never sell domains to front runners, but we question its ability to identify front runners. After all, it has failed to identify itself.

The company claims that these mysterious front runners are also "domain tasters," those clever characters that temporarily register thousands of domains just to test their "marketability." And it wants the world to know that if ICANN would just prevent people from returning addresses within five days for a full refund, it will quit self-registering domains.

But this is merely stating the obvious. If ICANN removes the five-day full refund, Network Solutions couldn't self register domains without paying good money for them. And it won't pay good money for them.

As Chris McElory's suit says, Network Solutions' self-registering trick is merely an effort to make some extra dough. If customers search on a name but don't immediately buy, his complaint says, they "cannot register their domain name through any of Network Solutions' less expensive competitors because their chosen domain is unavailable through any other service - which (unbeknownst to the customer) is now held exclusively by Network Solutions - who is now offering to sell the domain to anyone willing to pay its grossly inflated registration fee."

The suit even goes so far as to say that Network Solutions isn't the only guilty party. ICANN is also named. "ICANN rules tacitly say that Network Solutions practice is acceptable," Kabateck told us. "We aren't seeking damages against ICANN. We just want a declaration from the court that its allowing this to go on."

What does Kabateck think of Network Solutions' claim that it's merely trying to destroy domain tasters? "Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't get," he says. And we can assure you he's not stupid.

A federal jury in Kansas City, Kan., ruled against Mendelsohn after a judge excluded the testimony of five ex-employees from other departments at Sprint headquarters who claimed they had been released because of their age. Lawyers refer to such testimony as "me, too" evidence.

Sprint let Mendelsohn go in 2002 amid companywide layoffs that eventually numbered more than 14,000. She was part of the company's business development strategy group, which was scaled back from 75 employees to 57.

The supervisor who laid off Mendelsohn said she was the weakest performer in his unit.

Sprint's lawyers argued in Supreme Court that if a different supervisor at a company harbors bias, that's unfortunate, but it is not relevant to the claim by the person who filed the lawsuit. Sprint argued that such information unfairly prejudices a jury against a company.

The Bush administration took a middle ground between Sprint and Mendelsohn, saying evidence of age bias is sometimes admissible when it is committed by other supervisors at the same company. It cited as an example another supervisor dismissing an employee, saying the company is on a youth campaign.

In Mendelsohn's case, none of the five employees who would have testified on her behalf was laid off by Mendelsohn's supervisor and none worked in her business development group. The five were laid off as many as nine months before Mendelsohn and as many as three months after.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver sent the case back for a new trial, saying the testimony of the five ex-employees supported an alleged companywide age discriminatory scheme.

But mostly, people in Cordova talk about the discouraging wait for legal retribution for the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

It's been almost 19 years since the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground at Alaska's Bligh Reef, spurting 11 million gallons of crude into the rich fishing waters of Prince William Sound. In 1994, an Anchorage jury awarded victims $5 billion in punitive damages. That amount has since been cut in half by other courts on appeals by Exxon Mobil Corp.

Now the town of 2,200 looks anxiously to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear arguments Wednesday from Exxon on why the company should not have to pay punitive damages at all.

Scores of Cordova residents are among almost 33,000 plaintiffs — including commercial fishermen, Alaska Natives, landowners, businesses and local governments — who could see the $2.5 billion judgment taken away by the high court.

Network Solutions has forced millions of people to buy Internet domain names from them instead of cheaper competitors through a scheme that's netted the firm millions of dollars, a federal class action lawsuit filed today by Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP states. ICANN, whose policies facilitate the scheme, is also named in the suit, filed in U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

"Imagine if you asked a car dealer if they had a black convertible and were then forced to buy the car from them. Would you get a good deal? Each time someone asks Network Solutions about a domain name, the firm creates a monopoly for itself, forcing consumers to pay the price they demand," said Brian Kabateck, lead counsel in the class action and Kabateck Brown Kellner's Managing Partner.

Whenever someone searches for the availability of a domain name through Network Solutions' website, the company immediately registers the name for itself, preventing other companies from selling it and forcing consumers to pay Network Solutions' expensive fees.

If a consumer were to go to another, cheaper site to register the name, they would find the name is "unavailable." Consumers are never informed that inquiring as to a name's availability through Network Solutions results in the company holding a monopoly on selling that name.

This allows Network Solutions to continue charging substantially higher prices for domain name registration. Network Solutions charged $34.99 to register the name sought by this suit's lead plaintiff. A competitor would have charged $9.99.

Network Solutions' scheme is made possible by ICANN. ICANN allows companies that sell domain names to avoid paying registration fees for names cancelled within five days. Thus, Network Solutions can defraud customers at no cost to itself.

ICANN is aware that Network Solutions is abusing this policy and yet continues to facilitate its actions.

ICANN is the international organization, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, CA, that regulates domain names and other Internet protocols.

Kabateck Brown Kellner is one of the nation's foremost consumer law firms. Its clients have won more than $750 million against Google, Yahoo!, Farmer's Insurance, Eli Lilly and others. As a plaintiff's-only firm, Kabateck Brown Kellner is always on the consumers' side.

The fertilized eggs were implanted three days after she was dismissed from her job at a bakery in March 2005.

In its ruling Tuesday, the EU court said that under such an argument, women could delay having fertilized eggs implanted for years and claim unfair dismissal by saying they are pregnant.

Rather, the EU high court ruled that the Austrian court need only assess whether in vitro fertilization was considered by her employers as grounds for dismissal. European law bans gender discrimination.