Insights

On July 8, 2025, the Eighth Circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) Negative Option Rule, also known as the Click-to-Cancel Rule, on procedural grounds. The Click-to-Cancel Rule, which provided a streamlined path for consumers to cancel subscription services in a few clicks of a mouse, was scheduled to take effect on July 14, 2025, but the Court found that the FTC had failed to follow mandatory procedural requirements.

On June 30, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14312 effectively lifting (or beginning the process of lifting) most of the sanctions on Syria. Executive Order 14312 cites the leadership changes and the policies of the new Syrian government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa as the reasons for the removal of sanctions. On the same day, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Department of State took steps to implement the termination of the program by, among other actions, delisting appropriate individuals and entities from the List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN List). These actions followed the initial sanctions relief provided on May 23, 2025 by OFAC, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), and the State Department.

On 11 July 2025, the European Commission published the final version of its Code of Practice for General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence (GPAI). This Code is meant to serve as a tool for GPAI model providers, helping them to comply with the transparency, copyright and security provisions governing general-purpose AI models as set out in the AI Act (arts. 53 and 55), which will become applicable on 2 August 2025. Adherence to the Code is on a voluntary basis.

Since taking office earlier this year, the Trump administration has reignited tariff disputes between the European Union and the United States. The US has reimposed US Section 232 measures on steel and aluminum, extended the scope of these measures, and, on April 2nd, imposed IEEPA tariffs on EU products under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. These IEEPA tariffs were then reduced to 10% until July 9th.

On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (the OBBBA) which amended a number of Internal Revenue Code provisions related to employee benefits and compensation. Although not an exhaustive list, below are the provisions we expect will have the greatest impact on compensation and benefits for mid- and larger sized employers.

In our first alert in this weekly series on the EU Pharma Package we provided some important background and general information about the status of the Pharma Package and how the trilogues work, and in the second alert we discussed the proposed changes to regulatory data protection.

A recent decision by the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals (ASBCA) reinforces the FAR part 49 provisions governing terminations for convenience, which provide that contractors are entitled to fair compensation and that settlements for such terminations should not rigidly rely on cost and accounting data. In D-STAR Eng’g Corp., ASBCA Nos. 62075, 62780 (Apr. 28, 2025), the government had terminated the contractor’s cost-plus-fixed-fee research and development contract for convenience. Following the contractor’s submission of its termination settlement proposal (TSP), the government questioned certain costs claimed, disputed the fee owed to the contractor, determined it had overpaid the contractor, and issued a debt demand claim for disallowed costs. The contractor then submitted its own, affirmative claim incorporating its TSP and seeking additional costs and interest. The most interesting portion of the ASBCA’s decision is its discussion of the methods available to the parties to calculate the amount of fee to which the contractor was entitled following the termination for convenience, which we describe below. However, the ASBCA also addressed the allowability and allocability of various cost types that may be of interest, including termination settlement costs, direct labor, engineering overhead, and G&A.

On June 25, 2025, the European Commission adopted a new framework that simplifies EU State aid rules to make it easier for Member States to support the development of clean energy, industrial decarbonization and clean technology. This Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework (CISAF) will be in place until December 31, 2030 and replaces the Temporary Crisis and Transition Framework (TCTF), which was introduced in March 2023 to address the economic impact of the war in Ukraine and reduce the EU’s dependence on imported fossil fuels.

On July 9, 2025, the Directorate-General for Competition within the European Commission issued two informal guidance letters, both intended to bring increased clarity on competition law compliance to companies in the transport sector.

On June 27, in Trump v. Casa, the Supreme Court held that federal courts lack equitable authority to issue “nationwide”—or, using the Court’s preferred parlance, “universal”—injunctions. Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Barrett explained that whether Congress vested the judiciary with such power depends on the existence of a founding-era antecedent to the practice of universal injunctions. Finding none, the Court held that universal injunctions fall outside a federal court’s equitable authority.

Briefing. The Trump administration continues to raise the stakes for importers and other actors in the international trade space. Bloomberg Law reports that the Department of Justice has tasked its MIMF (Market Integrity and Major Frauds) Unit with investigating fraud schemes by companies dodging U.S. tariffs. The MIMF Unit is already well-versed in financial fraud investigations, is set to grow significantly with the addition of prosecutors previously assigned to consumer protection matters, and now is shifting resources to tariff evasion cases.

On July 8, 2025, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division announced a new program to provide rewards to individuals who report antitrust violations related to the Postal Service. This is the first program of its kind to provide a monetary reward to individuals who assist in the prosecutions of antitrust crimes. Under the new initiative, whistleblowers will have the opportunity to receive up to 30% of any criminal fines recovered for violations affecting the Postal Service, its revenues, or its property. 

On July 4, President Trump signed into law the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (“the Act”), or H.R. 1, which makes significant changes to federal healthcare programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Health Insurance Marketplaces. As proposed in previous versions of the Act, the Act includes cuts to the Medicaid program and imposes new requirements on beneficiaries, states, and healthcare providers.

The Supreme Court declined to hear two key federal environmental enforcement cases, effectively leaving in place lower court rulings that allow for broad private citizen enforcement under the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. Because of the Court’s denials, citizen plaintiffs remain free to pursue enforcement cases in the absence of governmental enforcement, thus companies remain at risk of being sued by active watchdog citizen groups.

On this 4thof July, Britain was also celebrating. The first country to secure a trade deal with the Trump Administration, the U.K. can indeed celebrate the so-called Special Relationship.

Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) are voluntary, environmental or public health projects that parties subject to environmental enforcement proceedings can propose as part of an administrative, civil, or criminal settlement. SEPs are unique and used specifically in environmental enforcement cases in part because (1) many environmental law statutes do not require a showing of harm to prove a violation; thus, redressing harm, outside of equitable relief, is not usually statutorily required; and (2) pollution is a public harm that is hard to redress, both individually and collectively.

In a previous client alert on a recent Civil Justice Council (“CJC”) report on litigation funding in England and Wales we discussed the issue of whether payment waterfalls providing funders with payment priority are compliant with the Damages-Based Agreements Regulations 2013 (“DBA Regulations”), the issue being a matter to be heard on appeal in June 2025. Funders will be pleased to hear that the answer is “yes”. The Court of Appeal has held that the DBA Regulations focuses on whether a funding agreement determines the amount of a funder’s fees by reference to the damages awarded to the successful litigant. The fact that a funder may receive its fees from the proceeds is not enough in itself for the arrangement to fall under the DBA Regulations.

In response to the recent U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, the New York State Department of Health (“NYS DOH”) issued a cybersecurity advisory (the “Advisory”) that cautions healthcare providers, such as hospitals, treatment centers, and healthcare practitioners, of a high likelihood of increased cyberattacks and heightened cybersecurity threat activity.  The Advisory follows similar announcements and warnings from U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), NYS Intelligence Center (NYSIC) and the Health-ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center).

In our first alert in our new weekly series on the EU Pharma Package, we provided some important background and general information about the status of the Pharma Package and how the trilogues work. In this second alert, we will discuss the respective positions of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union with respect to one of the most debated and anxiously anticipated topics on the table, the regulatory data protection (RDP).

Twenty years ago, the Supreme Court held that “one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.” MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 919 (2005). In the Grokster case, the Supreme Court found that peer-to-peer file sharing companies could be liable for copyright infringement for their users’ deployment of file sharing software. There, the Court found that liability was warranted because the file sharing companies knew that its users were infringing, and the companies materially contributed to that infringement.