Posts on ‘October 21st, 2008’

A class action against leading gift-card distributor Simon Property Group will go ahead after a New York appellate panel’s finding that the company’s imposition of improperly disclosed “dormancy” fees may constitute breach of contract and deceptive business practices. The proposed class would comprise New York residents who were issued cards before April 2005. The fees have resulted in similar actions in numerous states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The Supreme Court on Monday appointed Stanford Law School professor Barton “Buzz” Thompson to be special master in the case of , a water dispute over the Yellowstone River compact of 1950. The case comes to the Court directly through its original jurisdiction over conflicts between states. Thompson is an environmental and water law expert and, like many special masters, is a former Supreme Court law clerk.

A new delay may be coming for commercial fishermen who have waited 19 years for punitive damages against Exxon Mobil for the worst oil spill in U.S. history. A Seattle-based company that ran a fish-processing plant in Valdez, Alaska, has filed court papers objecting to the latest allocation plan, which the company’s lawyers argue assigns to plaintiffs larger or smaller awards than they deserve under a June ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The fate of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, will be in the hands of a federal jury on Wednesday. The Williams & Connolly defense team wrapped up its case Monday with Stevens testifying under cross-examination for two hours. White-collar lawyers question whether Williams & Connolly took too big a gamble in putting Stevens — known for his irritability in the Senate — on the stand. The hostility Stevens showed Friday during cross-examination was muted on Monday.

Dewey & LeBoeuf has announced plans to close its Charlotte, N.C., office by the end of the year, citing the consolidation of the banking sector and the slowdown in the structured finance market. Dewey executive director Steven DiCarmine noted in a firmwide memo announcing the layoffs that Dewey has recently pulled out of a number of other regional U.S. markets, focusing instead on international growth.

Jenner & Block, following in the footsteps of other firms in town, recently notified some partners that they should prepare to leave the firm. The Chicago-based firm is asking about 10 partners, both equity and nonequity, to exit, with the bulk of those affected currently working out of the firm’s biggest office in Chicago. No particular practice area is more affected than others, and associates and legal staff aren’t affected by the layoffs, the firm said.

When this year’s presidential balloting gets underway on Nov. 3 and 4, thousands of lawyers around the country will set aside the billables and devote their time instead to fielding frustrated voters’ calls at a national voter-protection hotline. At 25 call centers set up across the country — most of them overseen by law firms — volunteers expect to answer, on average, up to 10,000 calls during the two-day period.

A proposed joint venture between rival Internet companies Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. appears headed for the trash bin, just ahead of an expected U.S. Department of Justice challenge to the agreement. Assistant Attorney General Tom Barnett met on Oct. 17 with lawyers for the parties for the second time in two weeks. The bottom line of the meeting was grim. “Nothing good came from it,” said one lawyer.

One of the more confounding Supreme Court happenings of 2007 was Justice Anthony Kennedy’s recusal in two cases involving an important issue arising under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The question, returning to the Court soon, is whether parents can obtain tuition reimbursement for direct placement of their child in a private school special education program without first trying a public school program. If the Court agrees to hear the new case, will Kennedy sit it out again?

A New Jersey jury awarded Citigroup $364.2 million in damages on Monday after finding that Italian dairy giant Parmalat defrauded the financial services firm in a case stemming from a 2003 accounting scandal known as “Europe’s Enron.” The verdict ends months of litigation in the suit originally brought by Parmalat, which accused Citigroup of being complicit in the fraud that pushed the company into a 2003 bankruptcy. The jury awarded Citigroup the highest amount it could grant for monetary damages.