As most of you undoubtedly are aware, the Republican Party held its National Convention last week in Cleveland, Ohio, The D&O Diary’s home town. In light of this special event right in our own backyard, we deputized a special events reporter to attend and report back for the benefit of this blog’s readers. Our special events reporter’s account follows below. Our reporter, Rob LaCroix, a May 2016 graduate of Middlebury College, will be attending Stanford Law School in the Fall. I should add that the Convention took place in Cleveland at a particularly good time in the life of the city. We just brought home the NBA championship a few weeks ago, and the Indians are in first place in the American League Central Division. The fact that the Convention went smoothly and without incident (at least outside of the convention hall) is a point of great pride for the city. Here is our special reporter’s account. Continue Reading A Local Perspective on the Republican National Convention
The D&O Diary was on assignment in Europe this past week for meetings in Germany, with a brief stopover in Austria before returning home. The picture to the left was taken during our short visit to Salzburg, Austria, which is described below. The trip’s main event was a series of meetings in Munich with industry colleagues at Munich Re. The company’s beautiful Munich headquarters building on Königinstraße, opposite the main entrance of the Englischer Garten, is pictured below. 
he D&O Diary’s readers cover a lot of ground and have an incredible diversity of interests, if the latest round of Frisbee photos is any indication. Readers may recall that in connection with The D&O Diary’s recent 
One of the bedrock principles of our legal system is that criminal liability attaches only to those who act with intent or knowledge – that is, as the legal scholars say, with mens rea (or a guilty mind). The “
There have been few more powerful forces acting recently on the litigation environment around the world than third-party litigation financing. The recent rise of litigation funding, often accompanied by the active involvement of U.S. law firms, is changing the face of litigation in numerous countries. The collective action to be filed against MasterCard later this summer in the U.K. by U.S. law firm Quinn Emanuel, in an initiative being financed by Chicago-based litigation funding firm Gerchen Keller Capital LLC, is the latest and highest profile example of this trends. Indeed, the anticipated MasterCard action in some ways reflects the coming together of many of the important global litigation trends, as discussed below. The Quinn Emanuel law firm’s July 2016 press release about the planned lawsuit can be found 
For some time now, many commentators, including me, have been predicting that cybersecurity-related litigation could become an important part of the D&O litigation environment. And that may yet happen. For now, however, the results in the recent cybersecurity-related cases have been, from the plaintiffs’ perspective, not particularly promising. On July 7, 2016, in the latest of these cases to hit the skids, District of Minnesota Judge Paul Magnuson, in reliance on the report of the special litigation committee appointed to investigate the claims and in the absence of opposition from the plaintiff, granted the motions of the special litigation committee and of the defendants and dismissed the consolidated cybersecurity-related derivative litigation that had been filed against Target Corporation’s board. As discussed below, the plaintiffs’ track record in this type of litigation has been poor, which does raise the question whether this type of litigation will become a significant phenomenon. A copy of Judge Magnuson’s order in the Target Corp. case can be found 
The following post previously appeared as an article in a 
The time has come to publish the first round of Frisbee Photos! Readers may recall that in connection with The D&O Diary’s recent 
As I have noted in prior posts (most recently