Collagen and Semen (This Is Clickbait)

Ok, I admit it. I’m easily amused. So when I see a lawsuit arising from “deceptive marketing practices selling inferior chicken carcasses,” I’m going to laugh. This is clickbait for those of us who read lawsuits and appellate rulings but feel like a 10-year-old.

If you’re one of us, I recommend a federal judge’s ruling in Certified Nutraceuticals Inc. v. The Clorox Company in which we learn that the defendants allegedly have been passing off stuff from inferior chicken “frames” as valuable chicken sternum collagen.

Chortle.

This is probably serious business but that’s no reason we can’t be entertained. 

And now, in a similar vein, I direct your attention to a ruling last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit that begins with this phrase: “This case is about the birds and the bees….”

Now that’s excellent judicial marketing. You see an opinion that starts like that, you’re going to read it. I know I did.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as racy as I thought it would be despite involving a company called Sexing Technologies and a patent on semen sorting. The sex involved cattle and not people. The ruling, though, did have a nice bit of art:

If you stare at it long enough, it’s kind of titillating.

Chortle.

Told you so. Back when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld employment arbitration clauses, I told you that companies would come to love class actions. We already have evidence of this in a federal court ruling in New York: 

“Chipotle now protests that it is suffering a ‘manifest injustice’ wrought by the ‘multitude of arbitration filings’” that came in after the company had 118 employees bounced out of a class action because they’d signed arbitration agreements. “The irony is not lost on the Court.”

Chortle.

Don’t follow your dreams. The next time someone advises you to drop everything and go after what you’ve always wanted, consider this counter-advice: if you don’t go for it, you may save yourself years of wasted effort and frustration.

Things don’t usually work out.

I thought of this last week when reading this opening sentence from a New York federal judge’s ruling: “This litigation was prompted by a proposed, but never enacted, regulatory amendment; even today, years into the litigation, the parties’ disputes occasionally tilt toward the speculative or the hoped-for, rather than the actual.”

Yes, it’s fantasy litigation.

It gets better: the dispute is over whether a law firm can use military technical data for assorted presentations. The data has been printed or appeared on the internet, so what’s the problem?

They’re arguing over whether the stuff can be used without official permission even though it’s already out there.

So we’re preventing spies from learning about stuff they probably already know – just in case spies don’t look at the internet but do go to legal seminars.

I feel so much more secure.

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