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Award Fee Determination Must Be Made By Designated Official

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 01.29.07

As part of the long-running saga of the operation of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Colorado, the Court of Federal Claims in The Boeing Co. v. United States. (Jan. 17, 2007) has held the Department of Energy in breach because, after the initiation of an investigation of the contractor, the Secretary's office mandated lower award fees than DOE's Rocky Flats Manager had independently determined. Restoring the independent determinations, the court found that, when the contract specifies the individual who is to make the determination (here the Manager), his superiors may not override that determination without breaching the contract.

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Client Alert | 8 min read | 06.30.25

AI Companies Prevail in Path-Breaking Decisions on Fair Use

Last week, artificial intelligence companies won two significant copyright infringement lawsuits brought by copyright holders, marking an important milestone in the development of the law around AI. These decisions – Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta (decided on June 23 and 25, 2025, respectively), along with a February 2025 decision in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence – suggest that AI companies have plausible defenses to the intellectual property claims that have dogged them since generative AI technologies became widely available several years ago. Whether AI companies can, in all cases, successfully assert that their use of copyrighted content is “fair” will depend on their circumstances and further development of the law by the courts and Congress....