To loyal users, Yelp.com is a helpful way to find and share reviews of local businesses, but some business owners claim that the website's business practices represent something closer to an extortion scheme.

Miami-based law firm Beck & Lee has joined with a San Diego firm to file a class action suit against the company, according to Mashable. The plaintiff in the suit, a Long Beach Veternary Hospital claims it contacted Yelp to see if it could delete a bad review. At first the representative refused, but then offered to hide or delete the review for about $300 a month.

The East Bay Express ran a story last year claiming that Yelp was essentially "the business of extortion 2.0."

During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared -- or negative ones appeared -- after owners declined to advertise.

Because they were often asked to advertise soon after receiving negative reviews, many of these business owners believe Yelp employees use such reviews as sales leads. Several, including John, even suspect Yelp employees of writing them. Indeed, Yelp does pay some employees to write reviews of businesses that are solicited for advertising. And in at least one documented instance, a business owner who refused to advertise subsequently received a negative review from a Yelp employee.

Yelp immediately denied any wrong doing and claimed the story was inaccurate.

"While we haven't seen the suit yet, anyone can file one, and since the allegations are false we will dispute them aggressively," a Yelp representative tells Mashable regarding the latest suit.

Oklahoma City Council members hired a private law firm Tuesday to lead upcoming contract negotiations with the city’s police and firefighter unions.

The firm, McAfee and Taft, was hired in part because negotiations with the unions have gone poorly in recent years.

"It’s just broken,” Ward 4 Councilman Pete White said of recent negotiations with the public safety unions.

Two of the firm’s labor attorneys will be paid $225 an hour each to lead negotiations with the unions for the next fiscal year, according to a contract council members unanimously approved Tuesday.

City officials hope the arrangement helps improve a damaged relationship with the public safety unions.

"It’s just to put a new face on it,” White said. "The people that do the hardest jobs we have in this city are the police department and fire. For the relationship to be this acrimonious ... is not acceptable.”

City attorneys handled past negotiations and will assist with the upcoming negotiations.

The negotiations figure to be tense because the city will likely ask for concessions from its public safety unions in order to meet next year’s budget, which will be much smaller than this year’s.

A small-plane pilot from San Francisco, who hid his HIV-positive status for years out of fear of losing his license, can sue the government for disclosing his condition during a fraud investigation, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed Stan Cooper's damage suit in 2008, despite finding that the Federal Aviation Administration and the Social Security Administration had violated Cooper's rights by sharing his confidential personal and medical records. Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said Cooper hadn't been harmed financially and that federal privacy law doesn't authorize suits for emotional distress.

In reinstating the suit Monday, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the law was intended to compensate people for harm they suffer when a federal agency intentionally discloses their confidential records.

That harm often consists of embarrassment rather than out-of-pocket losses, Judge Milan Smith said in the 3-0 ruling.

Cooper, 67, a pilot since 1964, gave up his license after he was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985, when FAA rules still barred anyone with the AIDS virus from flying a plane. He said he reapplied in 1994 but did not disclose his medical condition.

Cooper's condition worsened in 1995 and he applied for Social Security benefits, with the assurance that his medical records would remain confidential.

He said he regained his health, discontinued his benefits and applied for a renewal of his license in 1998 after the FAA dropped its ban on HIV-positive pilots. He still did not disclose his condition, explaining later that the FAA required 10 years of medical records but didn't say how it would evaluate them.

The FAA revoked his license in 2005 after obtaining information from the Social Security Administration in the short-lived "Operation Safe Pilot," which examined records of 45,000 pilots, all in Northern California, to see if they had committed fraud in obtaining Social Security benefits or a pilot's license.

As litigators, cynics and viewers of A Civil Action know, how and where a lawsuit is brought can determine its outcome at least as often as the merits of the case. Perhaps the most potent civil procedure decision is the case's forum: state or federal court. Generally, corporate defendants prefer federal courts, and plaintiffs' attorneys prefer state courts. As a result "forum shopping" battles dominate the early stages of proceedings, as the sides fight over whether a corporation can be deemed a "citizen" of the state the plaintiffs come from; if both sides are from the same state, the case stays in that state's court.

So the big issue is where a corporation has citizenship. The Circuit Courts have interpreted the key statutory language -- citizenship exists where the "principal place of business" is -- in a few ways, but most assess the "total activity" of the corporation, including its purposes, type of activity, and legal site, and most of the others similarly look to the operations of the business as a whole. Only the 7th Circuit focused on the company's "nerve center", essentially meaning the place where the company is headquartered.

In Hertz Corp. v. Friend, our business-friendly Supreme Court unanimously swept away the case-by-case assessments of where businesses actually conduct their business and adopted the 7th Circuit's nerve center approach. Now corporations can insure federal diversity jurisdiction -- plaintiffs and defendants coming from different states -- whenever they most want it by (re)locating their headquarters.

Expect this decision to produce two dynamics. First, some corporations will relocate out of states where the courts are viewed as particularly plaintiff friendly, insuring claims against them will not be brought in those courts. Second, corporations will threaten to leave, if the state legislatures don't amend their laws to make corporate-friendly outcomes more likely if the case is heard in the state court.

The justices unanimously ruled for the state of Maryland in overturning a lower-court decision that had thrown out the confession to the police by a suspect in a child sexual abuse case.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the high court that an initial request for an attorney does not mean the police cannot question a suspect later if the person has been released from custody and decides to confess.

The Supreme Court generally has favored the police and limited the rights of suspects in recent years. On Tuesday, it ruled officers adequately warned a suspect of his legal rights when they told him he could speak to a lawyer before answering any questions.

The latest ruling involved Michael Shatzer, who had been imprisoned in Maryland for child sexual abuse in 2003 when police started investigating allegations he had sexually abused his 3-year-old son. Shatzer requested an attorney and the case went dormant.

Some 2 1/2 years later, the boy was old enough to offer new details. When a different police detective then questioned Shatzer about the case, he was advised of his rights and signed a form waiving them before confessing.

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied an appeal by Pacific Investment Management Co challenging class-action certification for a lawsuit alleging the world's largest bond fund manager tried to corner a market for U.S. Treasury note futures.

A U.S. appeals court in Chicago upheld a judge's ruling that certified as a class more than 1,000 investors who seek more than $600 million in damages.

Pimco, a Newport Beach, California-based unit of the German insurer Allianz SE appealed to the Supreme Court, but the justices turned down the appeal in a brief order without any comment.

The lawsuit accused Pimco of boosting its percentage stake in futures contracts on some 10-year Treasury notes to 42 percent from 12 percent over a two-week span in the spring of 2005. The relevant contracts traded on the Chicago Board of Trade.

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, Pimco argued that class-action status should not have been granted because some plaintiffs did not lose money and the class suffered from serious conflicts of interest that precluded certification.