Posts on ‘October 29th, 2008’

Get ready to relearn the Americans with Disabilities Act — by Jan. 1, 2009. New legislation signed last month has defanged a common employer defense, and the changes are going to have real repercussions in the workplace. The critical inquiry under the amended law is whether covered entities have complied with their obligations to reasonably accommodate disabled applicants and employees. Attorneys Lawrence Lorber, Fredric C. Leffler and Samantha Morris discuss what has changed and what employers need to do.

EDD special master Craig Ball investigates data from GPS navigation systems as a potential source of electronic evidence. As geopositioning grows more ubiquitous, from dashboard to cell phone, he suggests you ask, “How might I use locator data to make my case or clear my client?”

Clifford Chance’s latest round of attorney layoffs unfolded according to a carefully choreographed sequence of events — almost. As rumors hit popular legal blogs, the firm rushed out a brief statement that attributed the layoffs to “sluggishness in litigation matters.” The latest wave of attorney layoffs has shown that firms are more willing to disclose bad news than in the past. And with legal experts predicting more layoffs, firms in downsizing mode must decide if and how to go public with layoff news.

Nixon Peabody has grabbed a whopping 25 lawyers from the French wing of Taylor Wessing a little over a month after a New York judge rejected Taylor’s argument that Nixon was illegally stealing its lawyers. The move is part of the firm’s strategic plan, crafted over 18 months ago, that calls for 25 percent of the firm’s lawyers to work overseas by 2013, says Richard Langan Jr., Nixon’s managing partner. Currently, about 5 percent of the firm’s lawyers work abroad, including the 25 new attorneys in France.

Google will pay $125 million to authors and publishers to settle a high-profile copyright infringement dispute over the search engine’s efforts to put books online. Reached after three years of legal wrangling, the settlement is a business deal that will allow Google to go ahead with its project of digitizing millions of books. Observers have differing ideas as to who got the best deal: Google or the copyright holders.

Thelen’s Partnership Council has recommended that the firm’s partnership vote to dissolve the firm, informing staff that a dissolution committee had been formed and the firm expected to close Dec. 1. In the first sign of where attorneys may land, it appears about 60 lawyers could end up at Nixon Peabody, which until recent weeks had been viewed as a potential merger partner. The news was another blow to the San Francisco legal community, which only a month ago saw the demise of century-old Heller Ehrman.

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.