The Federal Trade Commission has sued Humboldt Merchant Services, alleging the payment processor knowingly enabled scam operators and shell merchants to access the payments system for unauthorized billing and deceptive consumer charges. The agency’s theory is notable: rather than focusing only on the merchants that allegedly carried out the scams, the FTC is aiming at the infrastructure provider it says made those schemes possible.

According to the FTC, Humboldt processed payments for entities tied to sham businesses and billing operations that allegedly lacked legitimate merchant activity.

Amazon.com Services LLC has filed a new inter partes review petition at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, opening IPR2026-00471 on September 11, 2026.

A California federal judge has rejected CashCall’s latest bid to unwind a $157 million Consumer Financial Protection Bureau judgment, preserving a major consumer-finance enforcement result in a case that has been litigated for years. The decision is significant not only because of the size of the judgment, but also because the court reportedly took a dim view of the company’s repeated efforts to avoid finality.

The dispute arises from the CFPB’s long-running challenge to a lending program tied to tribal entities, where CashCall was accused of using a tribal-lending structure to make high-interest loans that violated state usury and consumer-protection laws.

Monday’s legal news cycle underscored how quickly the terrain can shift for companies, litigants, and enforcement targets when multiple branches of the legal system move at once. The day’s most significant developments, as highlighted in a major national roundup, centered on the kinds of events that immediately affect legal strategy: court rulings, consequential filings, enforcement actions, legislative movement, and criminal matters.

While the underlying stories span different subject areas, the common thread is practical impact.

A new post-grant review, PGR2026-00074, has been filed at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board against MightySlab Distribution Company LLC, putting one of the company’s patents directly in the PTAB spotlight. The petition was filed on September 9, 2026. For patent litigators, prosecutors, and in-house IP counsel, this is the kind of early-stage PTAB matter worth monitoring closely as the record develops.

At this stage, the publicly available docket information identifies the proceeding by the patent owner’s name, but the key practical takeaway is clear: a petitioner is seeking post-grant review of a recently issued patent owned by MightySlab Distribution Company LLC.

The SEC has added a notable alleged fraud case to its recent enforcement lineup, charging a founder and two New Jersey-based companies in what the agency says was a $16 million Ponzi scheme. The matter appears as part of a broader batch of fresh SEC enforcement activity released in recent days, alongside related administrative and federal court actions that signal the Commission’s continued focus on investor-protection cases with classic fraud themes.

Although the Commission’s “what’s new” postings often package together actions released over several days, this case stands out because of both the alleged size of the scheme and the familiar enforcement theory behind it.

Amazon.com Services LLC has filed a new inter partes review petition at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, opening IPR2026-00471 on September 11, 2026. At this early stage, the PTAB docket indicates that Amazon is the petitioner, but practitioners will want to monitor the record closely for the identity of the patent owner, the specific patent number being challenged, and the prior-art combinations asserted in the petition as those details become available on the docket.

An IPR filing alone can be strategically significant.

The Justice Department and Department of Education have announced a joint finding that UC Berkeley School of Law discriminated on the basis of race in its admissions process, marking a significant federal civil-rights enforcement action in the post-Students for Fair Admissions landscape. Although the announcement is not a final court judgment, it signals how aggressively federal agencies may scrutinize admissions practices at colleges and universities following the Supreme Court’s rejection of race-conscious admissions policies.

For Berkeley Law, the immediate stakes are obvious: a federal finding of noncompliance can trigger pressure to change admissions criteria, recordkeeping, training, and internal review procedures.

The Federal Trade Commission said it and five states have notified the court that they intend to file a stipulated order to resolve antitrust litigation against Zillow and Redfin, marking a potentially important development in platform-market enforcement.

A new proposed consumer class action in the District of Nevada puts Vitauthority LLC’s supplement marketing under scrutiny. In Mathieson v. Vitauthority LLC, No. 2:26-cv-02828, the plaintiff challenges how the company allegedly marketed and sold certain products, teeing up the kind of labeling and advertising dispute that continues to drive class action filings in the health-and-wellness space.

Although the complaint details will matter, the putative class appears to center on consumers who purchased Vitauthority products and allegedly paid a premium based on the company’s representations.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s September 9, 2026 scheduling order in PGR2026-00033 does not resolve the merits of the post-grant review, but it is still an important procedural ruling for parties practicing before the Board. As is often the case in AIA trials, the order establishes the framework that will control the pace of the case, the parties’ briefing obligations, and the practical management of the dispute going forward.

At a high level, the Board issued a standard scheduling order setting deadlines for the major stages of the proceeding, including patent owner responses, petitioner replies, motions practice, and oral hearing-related events.

The Justice Department’s September 11 announcements stood out for pairing a rare national-security procedural development with high-stakes criminal enforcement news: DOJ said it has made the first use of the United States Alien Terrorist Removal Court, while also publicizing new sentencing and guilty-plea developments in major fraud and child-exploitation matters.

For legal professionals, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court development is the headline item.

The Justice Department has launched what it describes as its final wave of lawsuits challenging state and local laws that allow undocumented students to access in-state tuition and related higher-education benefits. The new suits target Hawaii, Arkansas, Utah, and the District of Columbia, extending a litigation campaign with potentially significant consequences for immigration policy, public university systems, and the balance of state and federal authority.

At the center of these cases is a recurring legal question: whether state or local tuition-benefit regimes for undocumented students are consistent with federal immigration law, or whether they are preempted by it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dealt a notable setback to the Trump administration by blocking an effort to keep a Michigan coal-fired power plant operating under claimed emergency authority. In siding with a coalition of states and environmental groups, the court concluded there was no genuine emergency sufficient to justify extraordinary federal intervention.

At a high level, the dispute tested how far the executive branch can go in invoking emergency-based energy powers to override market, regulatory, or retirement decisions involving aging generation assets.

A New York federal judge has ordered a new trial for Cognizant Technology Solutions after an employee won an $8.4 million verdict on claims that he was fired for reporting pro-Indian hiring bias. In a notable post-trial ruling, the court concluded that allowing the verdict to stand would amount to a “miscarriage of justice,” wiping away what had been a significant plaintiff-side win in a closely watched employment case.

The case centered on allegations that Cognizant favored Indian workers in hiring and staffing decisions, and that the plaintiff suffered retaliation after raising concerns internally.