Anyone who has worked on patent prosecutions knows how the work generally gets done and billed. First, you hire a trusted U.S. firm to handle the overall prosecution effort. Then, that firm lines up the various other firms it works with to handle international work. The local firm coordinates and supervises the international work and also monitors the costs. Fees and costs incurred by the foreign firms are charged back to the primary prosecution firm, which passes the charges along to the client.

BBC News reported a couple of months ago about a British court allowing service of a court order using Twitter. Twitter is, for those who do not yet know, an on-line network allowing users to post short messages that are then broadcast to a list of subscribers. In the particular case, a political blogger named Donal Blarney sought an order enjoining another user of the Twitter service. Because the target of the court injunction had not yet actually been identified, the court allowed the injunction to be served via a posting on Twitter.

Every now and then I'm reminded that the SCO bankruptcy remains pending. You might recall SCO as the company that sued Novell and a number of other companies claiming that it owned copyrights to code found in the LINUX open source operating system. Almost two years ago, SCO filed a Chapter 11 petition in order to protect the company while the litigation continued. SCO is represented by Laura Davis Jones of Puchulski Stang Ziehl & Jones, LLP.

Two Seattle bankruptcy lawyers, Marc Barreca of K&LGates and John Knapp of Cairncross & Hemplemann, recently teamed up to author a useful article on the current