Posts on ‘October 24th, 2008’

Bianca Jagger and other foreign nationals who are in the United States on tourist visas cannot meet New York City’s “primary residence” requirement entitling them to rent-stabilized apartments, the New York Court of Appeals has ruled. Jagger, a Nicaraguan native and U.K. citizen who was married to the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, has been fighting ejection from her $4,600-a-month Manhattan apartment for more than three years. She moved out temporarily, saying the apartment had mold and was uninhabitable.

A Philadelphia jury has rendered a defense verdict in one of the last diet drug mass tort cases pending in the Court of Common Pleas. The plaintiff alleged that his wife’s ingestion of the drug Pondimin led to her death from primary pulmonary hypertension. According to the court, the Complex Litigation Center still has pending 56 cases, with plaintiffs claiming that diet drugs caused PPH. Most such cases were disposed of following a multibillion-dollar global settlement with drug manufacturers.

Lawyers from McDermott, Will & Emery, Sidley Austin and Drinker Biddle & Reath have joined the team trying to bring New Jersey high school football coach Marcus Borden’s school prayer case to the U.S. Supreme Court. All three are working pro bono on the appeal from the 3rd Circuit, which, citing the Establishment Clause, sided with the school district that barred Borden from kneeling and bowing his head with his players for a moment of silence before games.

New York’s high court appeared skeptical Thursday about a 40 percent contingency fee agreement that allowed law firm Graubard Miller to get a $40 million payoff in just five months. Attorneys for Graubard Miller’s late client, Alice Lawrence, argued that the law firm is seeking to collect an unconscionable amount for little work and after assuming little or no risk under the arrangement. Several members of the court questioned the propriety of Graubard Miller seeking to collect the entire fee amount.

The Supreme Court justices this term have taken five environmental cases for decision thus far, some raising issues with potentially huge implications for the ability of environmentalists and the government to enforce the nation’s major environmental laws and for the wherewithal of business and industry to survive and prosper under those laws. The cases are likely to be especially revealing of the still-emerging Roberts Court in an area of increasing national and international concern.

Attorney Leonard Deutchman finds fault in the e-mail spoliation claim against Oracle. Since discovery sanctions are reserved for what cannot be undone, Deutchman argues, the de-duplication of e-mails was routine: it could be “remedied” by the production of de-duplication logs.

Regulatory, banking and capital market attorneys have a new calling: interpreting for worried clients how the $700 billion financial industry rescue package will help or harm them. Client questions are focusing on the terms of participating in the new capital, short-term debt and asset-relief programs spawned by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. There are potential conflicts of interest, executive-compensation restrictions and oversight issues that are giving companies pause, attorneys said.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, then the chairman of Intel, observed that every 18 months or so Intel and other semiconductor companies had managed to put roughly twice as many transistors on a chip. Moore’s observation ultimately became Moore’s Law. So how about applying the lessons learned from Moore’s Law — measurement and comparison, future thinking, and change and opportunity — to the legal world? Legal OnRamp CEO Paul Lippe says that a legal Moore’s Law would drastically improve lawyers’ productivity.

Thanks to the “thrust upon” exception to the so-called “hot potato gambit,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Thursday that Townsend and Townsend and Crew could not be disqualified from a patent case. The hot potato gambit, explains the Federal Circuit, is when a law firm creates a conflict so it can drop a smaller client for a bigger one. The exception is when the conflict could not have been foreseen by the law firm.

The U.S. Supreme Court justice least likely to speak up during oral arguments told a crowd of 200 lawyers gathered in Atlanta on Thursday that judges should spend more time listening and less time talking. “I believe quite strongly we, as judges, need to take the approach we’re here to solve difficult problems, not debate with lawyers,” said Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking on the 17th anniversary of the day he took his seat on the Court.