Lewis Roca Blog

The United States Patent & Trademark Office has enacted a Final Rule that will increase the
fees for filing trademark applications, maintaining trademark registrations and filing
oppositions and cancellations before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, effective
January 2, 2021.

After much haggling, Congress passed its second major COVID-related relief package on December 21, 2020. The $900 billion package is included in the 5,593-page Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which is expected to be signed by President Trump shortly and will provide funding for the federal government between now and the end of the current fiscal year on September 30, 2021.

Prize-linked savings (PLS) accounts are a new and exciting way for banking customers to experience the thrill of a lottery while personally funding their savings account. PLS accounts add a lottery-style feature to certain savings accounts where financial institutions offer incentives to its customers to win prizes. These prizes are funded by the interest that accrues from the pool of prize-linked accounts.

On December 16, 2020, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued new guidance to employers that want to require employees to get Covid-19 vaccinations when they become available to most Americans. The guidance also outlines the steps that employers must take before they can exclude unvaccinated employees from their facilities and job sites.

FireEye, Inc., a leading U.S. cybersecurity firm, recently disclosed that it had been hacked by a nation-state actor. The company has since revealed that the hack was likely perpetrated, in part, through an ongoing compromise of “Orion” IT monitoring and management software offered by SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC.

According to recent reports, cloud hosting and IT services provider Netgain, which bills itself as “the industry standard for secure and scalable IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) for accounting and healthcare,” has been forced to take some of its data centers offline after suffering a recent (and potentially ongoing) ransomware attack.

No question, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is giving rise to multitudes of delay claims (along with claims of other varieties) by contractors against the federal government.