Posts on ‘October 20th, 2008’

Kansas City, Mo.-based firms Polsinelli Shalton Flanigan Suelthaus and Shughart Thomson & Kilroy have elected to merge to form Polsinelli Shughart. The two offices will combine their headcounts — Shughart with about 180 lawyers and Polsinelli with about 300 — to total about 480 lawyers, breaking the new firm into the ’s top 100 biggest firms.

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett will make $300,000 over the next six months for its work as the Treasury Department’s lead adviser on the feds’ bailout plan, according to a contract released by the department. In its pitch, Simpson told Treasury the firm could do the work in about 40 percent fewer hours than the 6,267 the Treasury Department anticipated in its solicitation letters, according to the contract.

In-house lawyers, legal organizations and law firms won the first round of a fight with the Financial Accounting Standards Board over a plan calling for greater disclosures of lawsuits and other loss contingencies on financial statements — but they’re girding for a longer battle. After a flood of complaints from lawyers, but support from investors, the accounting board decided that it would develop an alternative plan and test the new and existing plan to see which works better.

When minority partners were asked about the lessons they see in the career of Barack Obama, arguably the nation’s most prominent minority lawyer, they all had strong opinions, even though they don’t all plan to vote for him. One lawyer noted that Obama wasn’t afraid to follow his own path, so young attorneys shouldn’t necessarily feel the need to join a big law firm. Another said that Obama’s success showed that minorities should emphasize hard work and merit as opposed to diversity and affirmative action.

If a company’s sole business is licensing and litigating patents, plus it’s run by lawyers, what isn’t protected by privilege? That’s the question being asked in a discovery fight between Diagnostic Systems, which is a subsidiary of patent-holding company Acacia Research, and a multitude of software companies it sued for patent infringement in California. The answer could affect future discovery battles involving patent-holding companies, and the Federal Circuit has taken note.

Perkins Coie beat out six firms in an unusual auction-style process to acquire the Madison, Wis., office of Heller Ehrman, office managing partner David Harth said Friday. Heller’s collapse meant the 16 lawyers and 10 staffers were out of a job with little time to dilly-dally, and keeping the office together was the “first priority,” according to Harth. So the office made up a binder of information to give to firms showing interest, and the partners unanimously chose Perkins Coie after a weekend of debate.

An epic legal battle going to trial in federal court in San Francisco this week will ask jurors to decide whether oil giant Chevron sanctioned human rights abuses that killed and wounded protesters at its Nigerian facilities, or was simply protecting its employees from belligerent kidnappers. The decade-long fight has produced a 2,000-item court docket that may become a rare, and potentially precedent-setting, test of company liability for injuries to foreign nationals at the hands of a foreign government.

For in-house counsel managing litigation matters, the hard part comes when the rubber meets the road and you actually litigate the case. Attorney Stewart Weltman provides some practical rule-of-thumb suggestions on how to rein in costs and optimize results. The more experienced the person monitoring your litigation, the more effective these rules will be when applied. Weltman covers tips for motions for summary judgment, depositions and hysteria in a bottle: e-discovery.

The bailout has introduced new liability for corporate officers and directors in the mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations markets, according to DeMaurice Smith of Patton Boggs’s government investigations and white-collar practice group. Companies should be reviewing statements and communications before government investigators step in. With legal actions certain to multiply in the coming months, Smith is advising his clients to look to their indemnity agreements with companies.