Posts on ‘November 14th, 2008’

Two former executives for a failed health care plan were sentenced to prison Wednesday for taking part in a scheme to hide the company’s financial woes. Barry Scheur, the first blind graduate of Yale Law School, was sentenced to 20 months; Robert McMillan, former CFO for the Oath for Louisiana HMO, was sentenced to 13 months. The judge, who said he received some 150 letters attesting to Scheur’s “exemplary life of selflessness,” departed from federal sentencing guidelines to hand down more lenient sentences.

Ronald Klain, a former O’Melveny & Myers partner and former chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, will become Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s new chief of staff. Klain, who began his legal career as a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White in 1987, is a seasoned political veteran with nearly 20 years of experience in Washington, D.C. He first worked with Biden while chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A buyer who purchased a counterfeit Jean-Michel Basquiat painting from an art gallery that had acquired it a year earlier from Christie’s can sue the auction house for fraud and may be entitled to punitive damages, a New York court has ruled. Guido Orsi, who paid the Tony Shafrazi Gallery $185,000 for the work 17 years ago, alleges that Christie’s passed off the painting as genuine at a 1990 auction, even though Basquiat’s estate had expressed doubts to the auction house about its authenticity.

If Georgia’s AG wants to keep fighting an order requiring the state to pay more than $10.5 million to attorneys who challenged Georgia’s foster care system, he can thank 11th Circuit Judge Edward Carnes for helping to get the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case. Carnes, who has compared the lawyers seeking the fees to a greedy John D. Rockefeller, was one of the judges who dissented from the 11th Circuit decision not to revisit its precedent on when civil rights lawyers should get bonuses for a job well done.

At the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia, as he has during several other arguments this term, expressed his frustration that some key statutory language wasn’t easily located in materials the parties had submitted to the Court. But this time, the justice’s impatience turned into contrition, and he ended up offering a rather colorful apology to one of the arguing attorneys.

An attorney who was sued for defamation by a New York law firm has been
sanctioned $14,000 for a “frivolous” legal maneuver — impleading his
adversary’s attorney as a third-party defendant. The suit arose from
Thomas F. Liotti’s representation of Anthony Galasso, a former
bookkeeper of Galasso, Langione, Catterson & LoFrumento who pleaded
guilty to embezzling upwards of $2 million from the firm. In an
interview Thursday, Liotti vowed to appeal the sanction.

Good news for law firms that do work for Lehman Brothers: Judge James Peck at federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan has given the failed investment bank permission to start hiring outside professionals in the normal course of business. Not surprisingly, law firms have been among the first to jump in on the action. First out of the gate: Thacher Proffitt & Wood and Squire, Sanders & Dempsey.