A company director who pledged all his stock to a merger can sue over allegedly false statements in the merger registration statement — even if he made the pledge long before the registration statement was drafted.

In its first ruling under a pilot arbitration program for large cases, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority issued a divided decision ordering Morgan Stanley to pay a former energy trader $8 million.

An East Texas federal jury concluded Friday that Barnes & Noble didn't infringe a patent owned by Alexsam Inc., a patent holding company that sued B&N and six other major retailers over their use of gift card technology.

Federal pre-emption, once an eye-glazing and rarely discussed topic, is now front and center on the Supreme Court's business docket — including two cases argued in the just-completed November argument cycle.

Ambac and its fellow bond insurer MBIA went hard at banks, accusing them of fraudulently obtaining insurance policies on subprime-backed securities. But so far, the litigation doesn't seem to have been a smashing success for the insurers.

TiVo and its lawyers at Irell & Manella and McKool Smith have secured yet another settlement in their patent litigation campaign against the digital television industry. The latest TiVo foe to cut a deal is Google's Motorola Mobility unit, which faced a jury trial next week in East Texas.

An East Texas jury called the latest round for Applied Medical in a long-running battle with Covidien and its subsidiaries over patents for surgical devices called laparoscopic trocars.

The proposed $7.2 billion class action settlement over credit card "swipe fees"—which would be the largest private antitrust settlement in history—has survived an initial hurdle. At a Friday hearing in U.S. district court in Brooklyn, Judge John Gleeson preliminarily approved the deal.

Banner Supply Company cut the first major deal with plaintiffs so far in the multidistrict litigation over defective Chinese drywall on Tuesday. It took the opportunity to bash another defendant, Knauf, for allegedly lying about the safety and fitness of drywall it sold to Banner.