The skies are darkening over the “walled garden” of Apple’s operating system. A Northern District of California court cleared the way for antitrust claims against Apple over its iCloud storage service on mobile devices. The court’s decision to deny Apple’s motion to dismiss in Gamboa v. Apple is a wake-up call for tech companies: courts are ready and willing to scrutinize platform-based restrictions, especially when those barriers are baked into product design. Judge Eumi Lee’s ruling also shows how a change in legal strategy can make all the difference for plaintiffs – or defendants – when charting a course through the early stages of antitrust litigation.

Some of the most critical evidence at trial comes in the form of deposition testimony from witnesses who are unable to testify live at trial. Done right, deposition designations can powerfully support your case. Done poorly, they can confuse the jury or worse yet, be excluded. Below are six best practices for California practitioners to ensure your designations are both effective and admissible.

Each year, upwards of 100,000 music fans pay up to $599 for the ticket price of weekend-long admission to the Coachella Music and Arts festival outside of Palm Springs, California. In 2025, however, nearly 60% of Coachella’s general admission ticket buyers turned to an increasingly ubiquitous short-term loan service to finance the steep cost of admission: Buy Now, Pay Later (“BNPL”). BNPL financial services typically allow consumers to split purchases into four or fewer interest-free installments, often without a traditional credit check. The organizers of Coachella, for example, partnered with a ticketing provider AXS to provide BNPL options allowing festival attendees to purchase tickets for as little as $49.99 up front with the remaining costs due in installments over the next several months.

The Federal Circuit’s decision in Eye Therapies, LLC v. Slayback Pharma, LLC  provides further insight into the tools available for patent claim construction. The Federal Circuit had previously held that a patent’s specification can evidence that the patentee intended for a term in the patent claims to have a different meaning than what is typical. Now, the Federal Circuit has held that the prosecution history—the exchanges between the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the patent applicant during the application process—can do the same.

Practitioners and stakeholders in the arbitration community have welcomed the long-awaited Arbitration Act 2025, which has now received Royal Assent, marking the most significant update to English arbitration law in nearly three decades. This milestone concludes a years-long process initiated by the Law Commission’s 2023 recommendations and underscores the UK government’s commitment to maintaining London as an arbitration hub.

The devastating January 2025 wildfires in southern California prompted Governor Newsom to declare a state of emergency on January 7, 2025 for Los Angeles and Ventura counties. This triggered California laws around price gouging and pricing restrictions in the wake of the emergency. While other, overlapping states of emergency will impact how price restrictions are ultimately calculated and considered – including local emergencies, and a statewide emergency relating to the ongoing bird flu outbreak – that the unprecedented scale of the wildfires will undoubtedly lead to increased scrutiny of pricing practices during the immediate aftermath, recovery and rebuilding.