A car dealership couldn’t be held liable in court for a salesman who sexually assaulted a customer, according to the Texas Court of Appeals. The customer had brought her car in for service and was waiting for a shuttle bus to take her home. The salesman offered to drive her home in his personal car, and she claimed that along the way, he made improper advances. The dealership immediately fired the salesman. The customer sued the dealership, but the court said the dealership h

If you sign a licensing agreement to sell someone else’s products, but that person already has an exclusive license with a third party to sell the same products, you could be legally on the hook. That’s a lesson that J.C. Penney learned the hard way, after it signed an agreement with Martha Stewart to sell a variety of her housewares in special dedicated sections of its stores. The problem was that Martha Stewart had previously signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Mac

If you lease a store or other business and someone trips and falls outside the building, are you legally responsible? That often depends on what’s in your lease – so this is something you may want to think carefully about when you negotiate. This issue came up recently when a woman named Sabena Beriy fell on what she claimed was a poorly maintained curb outside a P.F. Chang’s China Bistro restaurant. P.F. Chang’s had leased the property from a landlord as part of a larger dev

You can’t obtain a patent for taking some ordinary process in the real world and coming up with a computer program that makes it easier, according to the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision is important because many companies have been trying to patent their apps and other programs to keep competitors from taking their business away. In the Supreme Court case, a company called the Alice Corporation tried to patent an online system to reduce risk in financial transactions. Alice’