Hewlett-Packard's legal team will have a hard time persuading a judge to stop former CEO Mark Hurd from becoming president of Oracle Corp., employment law experts say. HP sued Hurd on Tuesday, claiming that he violated a confidentiality provision of his severance agreement by accepting the post at Oracle. Without explicitly saying so, HP's complaint relies on the doctrine of inevitable disclosure, a concept that has been shot down by some California judges.

A study of more than $4 billion worth of law firm time sheets submitted by 90,000 people at 3,500 firms portrays an industry fraught with inconsistency. About 85 percent of the lawyers charge clients different rates for the same work. The location of the biller and the size of the biller's firm -- not the biller's experience -- are the variables that most influence how much a client will pay. And while in-house counsel talk tough about keeping rates in check, they OK almost three-fourths of all timekeepers' rate hikes.

In the first appellate ruling on a cutting-edge privacy issue, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has declared that cell phone location data may trigger Fourth Amendment concerns and that prosecutors demanding access to such records may be required at times to satisfy a probable cause standard. The ruling is a setback for the Justice Department, but it also reverses a decision by a Pennsylvania federal court, which had ruled that prosecutors must always show probable cause to access such cell phone data.