WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a Utah federal judge’s finding that certain claims of a patent describing a system of programming vehicle controllers were invalid in view of a prior art reference that was on sale before the claimed device’s “critical date”; the panel rejected the appellant’s argument that the judge relied on inadmissible evidence in reaching the decision.

BOSTON — The Massachusetts Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts (IOLTA) Committee can appeal following a class settlement approval to challenge an alleged failure to provide timely notice of the settlement or the opportunity to be heard on whether it should receive residual funds, but the committee lacks standing to contest a “settlement’s over-all fairness, reasonableness, or adequacy, or otherwise attack the validity of its terms,” the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in a landlord/tenant class dispute.

CINCINNATI — An Ohio federal judge granted default judgment to Columbus Life Insurance Co. in its suit seeking a declaratory judgment that a $500,000 insurance policy it issued is void due to the insured’s purported misrepresentations in the policy application, finding that the insurer is entitled to default judgment due in part to the insured’s failure to abide by court-imposed conditions to file a brief out of time and that the policy is void because it lacked an insurable interest due to the alleged misrepresentations.

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — An insured’s bad faith claim alleged against an auto insurer is dismissed without prejudice, a Pennsylvania federal judge said April 14 after determining that the insured failed to offer evidence in support of her argument that the insurer’s $15,000 settlement offer was unreasonable.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court should let stand a Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision that affirmed a final judgment of $193 million for a qui tam relator who sued Eli Lilly & Co. for reporting falsely deflated drug prices to the government in order to profit off of drug rebate programs because the two questions presented to the high court by the drug manufacturer “are uniquely poor candidates for this Court’s review,” the relator contends in an April 14 opposition brief.

BOISE, Idaho — Albertsons Companies Inc. announced in an April 14 press release that “it has reached a $774 million settlement framework to resolve substantially all of the opioid-related claims brought against the Company by state, local and tribal government entities nationally.”

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama’s reporter shield law does not protect all information that could reveal a confidential source but only “information that would inevitably reveal the identity of a confidential source,” a split Alabama Supreme Court held in answering a certified question from an Alabama federal court that is presiding over a defamation case brought by a member of the University of Alabama’s men’s basketball team against The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A district court properly determined that an insured’s breach of contract and bad faith claims against a homeowners insurer fail because it is clear that the insured failed to file suit within the policy’s one-year suit limitations provision, a panel of the District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said in affirming the lower court’s judgment.