Posts on ‘October 16th, 2008’

Three high-profile M&A lawyers are leaving O’Melveny & Myers for Shearman & Sterling, according to sources familiar with the deal. San Francisco partners Steve Camahort, Michael Kennedy and Michael Dorf will reportedly be joining Shearman, a firm where they long ago practiced as associates. While at O’Melveny, the trio worked on a number of big deals, such as representing Sirna Therapeutics in its $1.1 billion sale to Merck and Vector Capital’s $634 million bid for SafeNet.

When a client wants to convert to e-billing, Loeb & Loeb does not panic — they welcome the arrangement. It requires some adjustments on client intake procedures, billing formats and communication, but e-billing only replaces the printing and mailing of invoices, which saves paper.

Corporate in-house counsel anticipate a litigation spike next year to reverse a two-year dip in lawsuits and regulatory proceedings, according to Fulbright & Jaworski’s 2008 Litigation Trends Survey. The results illustrate the shift from a long period of prosperity to the start of “a period of serious economic challenge that is likely to fuel litigation over who is to blame and who should pay for the consequences,” said Stephen C. Dillard, who chairs the global litigation practice at Fulbright.

While the U.S. government is set to spend billions for stock in nine of the country’s largest financial institutions, attorneys for smaller banks are scrambling to find out whether their clients can or should take advantage of the Treasury Department plan to buy into other banks. Every bank should at least take a look at it, says Nelson Mullins partner J. Brennan Ryan. However, some sectors of the banking industry say that the banks most in need of help probably aren’t going to get it from this package.

The jury heard opening statements Wednesday in the trial of four men — including a former law firm partner — accused of conspiring to defraud the IRS by marketing bogus tax shelters through KPMG. The trial got off to a shaky start, with one juror telling Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that she could no longer be objective. Kaplan dismissed the juror but told her he was directing prosecutors to investigate her for perjury or obstruction of justice.

As many corporate counsel watch their litigation bills mushroom, they need to recognize the overwhelming effect that technological change has had on the litigation process, including its dramatic impact on cost, says Fulbright & Jaworski’s Robert Owen. Last month, the president signed into law a bill that may help to rein in some of the excesses of document discovery and lower the anxiety level about the inadvertent production of privileged information.