Posts on ‘December 11th, 2008’

A review of the compensation of Southeastern chief legal officers who are listed among the top five highest-paid executives in their public companies’ most recent SEC filings reveals an average total package in the neighborhood of a million dollars. As the economy spirals downward, GCs may fare better than their law firm counterparts, but Robert T. Graff, managing partner of legal search firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, says, “I think the numbers next year will look pretty different.”

Several Supreme Court justices questioned on Dec. 10 whether AT&T Corp. is discriminating against former employees by paying smaller retirement checks to women who took pregnancy leaves in the 1960s and 1970s. The Court heard arguments in the case of four women who lost seniority credit when they took maternity leave before passage of a 1979 law that barred the practice of treating pregnancy leaves differently from other disability leaves.

A pair of cases now before the 3rd Circuit present strikingly similar facts — students disciplined for creating fake MySpace.com pages that ridiculed their principals — but very different outcomes. One lower court ruled that a student was properly suspended for creating a page depicting her principal as a pedophile and a sex addict. But a separate lower court ruled that punishing a student for a page that depicted his principal in derogatory terms violated the student’s free speech rights.

The Mercer County, N.J., Bar Association has fired its executive director, Francine Kowalczyk, under circumstances suggestive of mishandling of funds and has requested that the county prosecutor investigate her activities. A long-time bar association member who spoke under the condition of anonymity says an internal audit revealed that money had been removed from the association’s bank accounts and replaced shortly after the audit was undertaken.

During Supreme Court arguments Wednesday in a case involving claims against high-ranking government officials over post-Sept. 11 detention practices, discussion frequently turned to an unusual hypothetical scenario posed by Justice Stephen Breyer: a lawsuit over a mouse found in a bottle of Coca-Cola. Though Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. at one point called the hypothetical “by its nature particularly absurd,” he and the other justices who adopted it seemed to find it quite instructive.

On Wednesday, an aspect of the Bush administration’s war-on-terror policies drew criticism from at least some of the Supreme Court justices: the roundup of Arab-Americans and Muslims that the government said had some terrorist connection, in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the Court seemed unlikely to act on that skepticism and expose top government officials to personal liability for their role in ordering and administering the roundup.

A federal judge has granted final approval of settlements worth more than $95 million in the massive price-fixing suit against the country’s top lumber manufacturers, as well as attorney fees of more than $37 million. But U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond decided that, in light of a recent dispute that erupted among some of the plaintiffs lawyers, the allocation of fees among plaintiffs lawyers from more than 30 firms must be approved by the court.

Avoiding a costly trial, Princeton University will pay $90 million to settle a claim that it misused a multimillion-dollar gift received in 1961 from the heirs to the A&P Supermarket fortune. U.S. universities, whose endowments totaled more than $400 billion before the market plunge, have watched the case closely because it raises a crucial question: How strictly must universities adhere to donors’ wishes about how contributions should be managed and spent?

Virtually every major Canadian law firm and nearly a dozen U.S. firms have been working on it since it was announced in July 2007, but the largest leveraged buyout in history is now dead. After 17 months, litigation and an 11th-hour attempt to salvage the $41 billion buyout of BCE Inc., the investor group that had targeted the Canadian telecom giant issued a statement early Thursday saying it is terminating the agreement. For its part, BCE responded with a demand for the $980 million break-up fee.

This year will end with the lowest number of executions in 14 years, reflecting public and government concerns about fairness, adequate legal representation and even the cost of capital punishment, the Death Penalty Information Center says in a report released Thursday. Just as significant, during 2008, 111 people were sentenced to death, the lowest number since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.