House lawmakers passed a bill today to overhaul the U.S. patent system for the first time in nearly 60 years, Nathan Koppel notes on the Wall Street Journal Law Blog: The House passed the America Invents Act on a 407 to 117 vote, WSJ reports.  The bill would change how the U.S. grants patents and award them to the party which is “first to file” an invention instead of the “first to invent” it. The change wo ...

David Wanetick, Managing Director at IncreMental Advantage, LLC, a valuation firm with expertise in valuing intangible assets and emerging technologies, based in Princeton, NJ,  opines at The Business Insider: Valuing a patent is complex and imperfect. Below we’ll go into some detail surrounding the methods used to determine a patent’s value. Each is applied under different circumstances, and impacted by ma ...

Who Is the Mystery Hamptons Moneybags? asks the New York Times DealBook. The hunt is on for the New York mogul with questionable cash management skills. Speculation bubbled on Wednesday after a receipt left hanging out of a Capital One ATM in East Hampton that displayed its owner’s remaining balance as $99,864,731.94 — yes, that would be $99 million and change — was posted on Dealbreaker. The receipt, which ...

The Accountable Care Fiasco That's what the Wall Street Journal calls the state of developing real-world guidelines for "the Accountable Care Organizations that are supposed to be the crown jewel of cost-saving reform." The theory for ACOs, as they're known, is that hospitals, primary-care doctors and specialists will work more efficiently in teams, like at the Mayo Clinic and other top U.S. hospitals. ACOs ...

Lawyers and Accountants Once Put Integrity First So asserts Mark W. Everson, commissioner of the IRS from 2003 to 2007, in an opinion piece for the Sunday NY Times: Three or four decades ago, investors and regulators could rely on these professionals to provide a check on corporate risk-taking. But over time, attorneys and auditors came to see their practices not as independent firms that strengthen the int ...

No Parties After IFRS Adoption in Canada When measuring the costs of IFRS implementation, there are the not-at-all trivial costs of changing accounting methods.  But there are also opportunity costs of spending time becoming IFRS compliant that you could have spent doing something other things. "The greater cost has really been the diversion of intellectual capital during this time period from doing more pr ...

SEC Wakes Up to Reverse Merger Companies Weeks after several Chinese reverse-merger companies have stopped trading in the US amid widespread fraud allegations, the Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a warning that, hey, maybe investors ought to think twice about those reverse-merger companies.  Okey doke!  Mark Gongloff relays from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.  The Securities and Exchange Co ...

Forbes reports:  In the last (pre-drinking) session at the D: All Things Digital conference at the Terranea resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on Wednesday, we heard from  Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and founder of Netscape and various other tech start-ups. Chatting him up: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the session: Marc ...

More Feedback: Editor: I read the May 2011 QuickRead – “Tips for Valuators” concerning stub years. I have run into this issue several times and I have seen it misapplied many times and I am glad you wrote about the topic. I noticed two points in the article that I believe need further clarification. The first thing that I noticed in the article is that the PV factors need to be modified as well if you are d ...

Calculation Engagement vs Valuation Engagement. In April, QuickRead featured some analysis of In Re: Marriage of Hagar in our Case Law—State section.  At issue in Hagar was the difference between a Calculation Engagement and a Valuation Engagement.  The Calculation Engagement the husband in the case presented was deemed unsuitable by a judge, in this particular case, because it the valuator admittedly didn’ ...

Have you had a chance to check out the Guard Series™ insurance policies?   Since claims against BV practices and properly credentialed professionals have historically been quite rare, these policies are deeply discounted.  NACVA and Primus Assurance Group (PAG) announced the policies' availability last fall, and since then PAG has built out its web site with lots of detail: Providing Professional Peace of M ...

LinkedIn Features Booming CVA/AVA Activity Have you visited LinkedIn lately?  The NACVA AVA/CVA Certification group as of this writing has 935 members.  Follow the link and join in the conversation! This year is NACVA's 20th Anniversary.  What milestones do you remember being a part of?   QuickRead's Conversations with the Masters staff is preparing for an interview with Shannon Pratt.  Do you have question ...

Lending Improves The Wall Street Journal reports that Small Business Lending Has Improved. A Braun Research survey performed for Capital One Bank found 85% of owners polled in March said they’re able to access the financing they need, up seven percentage points from the fourth quarter of 2010 and 15 percentage points from a year ago. . . . but Owners Fear Economic Uncertainty Economic Uncertainty, Spending ...

Did you see the news?  NACVA has partnered with the American Institute of Expert Witnesses (AIEWE), the organization dedicated to training and mentoring professionals in the art of delivering effective courtroom testimony, withstanding grueling cross-examination, and communicating persuasively to judges and juries. AIEWE courses will be offered through the Consultants’ Training Institute (CTI), NACVA’s trai ...

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog says big regulatory changes are under way:   “Dodd-Frank is Sarbanes-Oxley on steroids. It’s an exponentially greater volume of regulation,” says Margaret Tahyar, a Davis Polk partner. The “sheer number of rules still in the pipeline makes it almost inevitable agencies will miss an increasing number of deadlines over the next year.” The Dodd-Frank law has 849 pages, compared ...