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business corporate law, civil procedure, contracts law, environmental law, evidence, governments, healthcare law, legal ethics, and tax law

What's here Clients hire corporate lawyers to make useful products. These products are documents, such as contracts and corporate bylaws. Lawyers have good tools for making documents; standard forms and precedents from prior engagements are prime examples. But, corporate lawyers do not seem to use other tools whose employment might contribute to the utility and value of their products. These tools, employed by designers, include a focus on the reader and actual user experience, and an attention to typography, to facilitating communicative effectiveness through careful attention to the presentation of text. This paper reflects work by corporate lawyers trying to learn from designers, their work-product, and their literature, in creating legal documents for clients. The materials considered here are governance documents for nonprofit corporations. This paper notes several themes emerging from the literature study, explains why governance materials are a good vehicle for this work, characterizes typical executions of those materials, describes in detail and provides examples of the documents we developed, and makes a few observations about continuing work in the area. The work here is early-stage. As designers might say, we're doing ideation and prototyping. But, we do think the work is suggestive of how even modest awareness of design considerations can make our work-product better for our clients. The author is grateful to Jennifer Gonzalez for her research assistance and to Sean Hewens, James Lee, Kim Mitchell, Ryan Stouffer, George Triantis, and Steve Weise for their guidance and encouragement. Documents as communication projects ...

civil procedure, computer internet law, contracts law, and patent law

Introduction 3D printing is an emerging technology that is moving fast from the workshop into the home. No longer are the rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing capabilities of 3D printers reserved for engineers and researchers. Today consumers, hobbyists, and technophiles can download a computer-aided design or CAD file (a digital representation of a physical product) and additively "print" a three-dimensional product or component as simply as one can print words to a page. 1 In 2012, these digital printable items were coined as "physibles" by the notorious online piracy website The Pirate Bay. 2 This technology has wide-ranging and profound effects on intellectual property rights, particularly patents. Centuries of traditional manufacturing processes and commercial infrastructure have shaped patent law under the assumption that physical goods are traded in physical form. For example, a factory infringes a patent by "making" the patented product, a retailer infringes a patent by "selling" the patented product, and a purchaser of a product infringes a patent by "using" the patented product. 3 Because these various acts each constitute direct infringement, patent owners are generally able to enforce their patents against different entities to extinguish any harmful infringement at the source. Sometimes it can be difficult or impractical to target a direct infringer and extinguish infringement. Suppose a patented machine is only partially assembled (and thus noninfringing) 4 but is sold across the country to individuals who later assemble the entire machine (and thus infringe). 5 One could sue each ...

administrative law, commercial law (ucc), environmental law, governments, immigration law, international trade law, and securities law

INTRODUCTION The Employment Creation Immigrant Visa ("EB-5") is a United States Customs and Immigration Services ("USCIS") administered immigrant investor program that can and should mature into an optimized ethical financial instrument of sustainable capitalism. 3 With this evolution, EB-5 can be used to kick-start domestic investment in anticipatory design and construction of resilient "green" infrastructure. It can do this via investment in the regeneration and maintenance of a healthy environment, while creating perpetual local employment. By identifying and prototyping best practices via this application of EB-5 to federally mandated nonpoint source storm water management, the State of Vermont could serve as a model for scaling up this application throughout the U.S. The EB-5 program was conceived to grant citizenship to those with proven facility in turning capital into jobs. 4 As envisaged by Congress, EB-5 permits these investors to provide this expertise by indirection via a requisite investment, cash, or its equivalent at risk with no hedging, and arms-length policy oversight. 5 Though the program is of long standing, and well supported by Congress, it suffers from fundamental conflicts of opposing values, underutilization, and inefficiency due to lack of focus on what constitutes appropriate foreign investment in genuine domestic job growth; as well as how to measure that growth. In addition, it appears that the USCIS' expertise in immigration--administered under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security ("DHS")--is matched by its inability to master the many, varied, and constantly evolving ways and ...

communications law, computer internet law, copyright law, education law, evidence, and trademark law

I. Introduction Three-Dimensional printing (sometimes called "additive manufacturing" 1 or "rapid prototyping" 2 ) will transform our economy and culture in dramatic ways. 3D printers can already make a wide variety of things: shoes, clothes, car parts, toys, guns, human body parts, and much more. 3 Their capabilities will only continue to improve. Traditionally, most sculptures and other three-dimensional art started with a block of solid material from which the artist removed unwanted pieces until she formed the sculpture. 3D printing turns this idea on its head: complex shapes and sculptures will no longer require removal of material from a unitary block; rather, the printer will build the object up layer-by-layer. All you need to print almost anything is a printer, "ink," and computer files detailing the item being printed. The confluence of 3D printing, 3D scanning, and the Internet will commingle the physical world and the digital world and will bring millions of laypeople into intimate contact with the full spectrum of intellectual property laws. 4 One of the areas most affected by 3D printers will be three-dimensional art. This Article begins the work of identifying and responding to the effects of 3D printing technology on copyright law. After introducing the technology in Section II, this Article analyzes three ways in which 3D printing (together with 3D scanning and the Internet) will affect the creation, delivery, and consumption of art. First, Section III discusses how 3D printing will bring the fields of ...

business corporate law, communications law, computer internet law, constitutional law, copyright law, governments, international trade law, and patent law

Introduction For centuries, objects have been designed by processes involving pencil and paper drawings or the construction of physical prototypes. Beginning in the 1980s, machines, products, and components thereof have been increasingly designed mostly - if not entirely - on computers using computer aided design ("CAD") programs. 1 CAD programs are widely used by designers, engineers, and architects today to imagine and make virtual 3D models of various objects, enabling the objects to be fully digitally developed before they are physically created. 2 CAD programs offer many advantages over non-digital processes, such as the ability to easily change and refine a design, as well as a high degree of precision in defining all of the features and dimensions of the design. 3 While designs can certainly be created and manipulated in CAD programs from scratch, 3D scanning technology can also be used to make a CAD file that digitally captures and represents an existing object. 4 Once created, CAD files function as digital "blueprints" that can be used by manufacturers to make products to exact specifications in a factory setting. 5 Like other digital files, CAD files may be easily and widely distributed via any digital storage medium or network, such as the Internet. 6 Three-dimensional or "3D" printing is an emerging technology that is already having an enormous and profound impact on how products are made and sold. Just like CAD programs largely obviated the need for paper drafting and physical prototyping, 3D printing has the capability to ...