Posts on ‘October 10th, 2008’

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. removed funds from accounts it maintained for three Lehman Brothers units just hours before they filed for bankruptcy last Friday, it frustrated dozens of plaintiffs who had targeted millions of dollars in those units — and may have exposed JPMorgan to possible litigation over the Lehman funds. Said a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, “What the rest of us were trying to do in court, J.P. Morgan just did on its own.”

The moribund credit markets have stalled financing for more than a year and stanched the flow of merger and acquisition deals, but some lawyers are using extraordinary deal structures and creative financing to close deals. Lawyers say the deals still happening are between motivated buyers and sellers willing to think outside the box while at the negotiation table. “We’ve definitely come across a couple of strange ones in the last couple of months,” said Stephen Boyko, a corporate partner at Proskauer Rose.

When attorney Robert J. Ambrogi revisited his last podcast column, he found five of the 10 fell off the digital airwaves. But after surveying the current crop, he deems legal podcasting alive and well. Here are the latest 10 podcasts he views as essential to legal professionals.

Bonuses vary wildly among law firms. Some firms give tens of thousands of dollars to associates regardless of individual performance, while others require Olympian levels of all-round commitment in return for sums that could probably be more easily obtained through a few after-hours shifts at the local pub. Here’s a look behind the main bonus systems operating at major London and regional firms as well as what the future of bonuses in the legal world is likely to be.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit faces a new misconduct complaint that accuses him of illegally disabling court software that was intended to detect improper staff Internet downloads. The filing also includes the first formal complaint about Kozinski having sexually explicit images on a public Web site. The complaint came from attorney Cyrus Sanai, who first discovered and exposed the images on Kozinski’s personal Web site, and who has filed previous complaints against the judge.

A leaked copy of Heller Ehrman’s dissolution plan shows a firm that has a good chance of avoiding bankruptcy — if it can collect unpaid bills and liquidate assets with the success promised on paper. The plan puts Heller’s assets at $258 million and its liabilities at $72 million, three-quarters of which is money owed to the firm’s banks. The document predicts a 90 percent success rate in collecting on its $174 million in accounts receivable and work in progress.

Robert Graham, a former senior lawyer at General Re Corp., faces life in prison for doing what his defense attorney calls a “few hours work” on a fraudulent deal. Prosecutors want to sentence Graham to a “substantial” term — up to 230 years behind bars — because more than 250 American International Group investors lost at least $544 million from the fake deal with Gen Re. The defendants have countered with an expert who maintains that there was zero loss and no victims.