Posts on ‘December 15th, 2008’

Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Palin. Campaign over. Outcome decided. Now it’s time for the after-action reports, political and otherwise. So, are there any work matters lessons to be learned? As one of the candidates might say, “You betcha.” Attorney Michael Maslanka offers six lessons, including how the Sarah Palin-blaming illuminates the fundamental attribution bias and why it’s best to use your own story and not hijack the other side’s.

If there are any winners in the $50 billion scandal surrounding former Wall Street wizard Benard Madoff, it will be lawyers and accountants. Professionals in both fields are sharpening their pencils to prepare for an onslaught of litigation expected to hit South Florida federal and state courts in the wake of Madoff’s arrest last week on fraud charges. One law firm partner said he expects to see more such revelations as the economy worsens. He called Madoff a “harbinger of things to come.”

Consultant Ari Kaplan attended the IQPC Sixth Annual E-Discovery conference in Manhattan to close out the year on electronic discovery. The recurring issue throughout the two-day exposition was the growing importance of search and its influence on the life cycle of information.

Sometime in the next decade, an economic historian will write the definitive account of the 2008 credit crisis. The extent to which there was a regulatory failure is a critical issue that such a history must face. Indeed, this issue is sufficiently pressing that even at this early point it needs to be addressed. What responsibility does the SEC bear for not resisting the steady slide of the major investment banks into insolvency? Law professor John C. Coffee Jr. examines the issue.

Jury research is a staple of trial preparation, yet most corporate counsel are not getting good value on their investment because they delay such research until close to trial. But postponing these expenses until they are seen as unavoidable can ultimately be far more costly, say consultants Nancy L. Neufer and Robert S. Duboff, who suggest that conducting jury research at the onset of a big case can help make early decisions that are critical to achieving the best possible outcome for your company.

Antitrust attorneys expect the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to ramp up merger scrutiny in President-elect Barack Obama’s administration and boost negotiation and document review work for lawyers. In that kind of climate, companies would need more help from lawyers to sell the merits of the deal to the government, said Jim Wilson, chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Antitrust Law.

Neel Chatterjee represents Internet companies like PhotoBucket, eBay and Facebook — and IP guru Peter Detkin calls him ” rising star” in Silicon Valley. The Orrick partner has the kind of drive that saw him bill 3,000 hours in a recent year and that makes opposing counsel perceive him as a “take-no-prisoners type of lawyer” — but off the clock he seems more goofy than a typical Valley workaholic. His now-famous Halloween getups have included Marilyn Monroe and a “patent troll.”

The former chairman of Greenberg Traurig’s tax practice, Jay Ira Gordon, pleaded guilty Friday to defrauding the IRS. Gordon resigned from the bar in 2006 after revelations he took more than $1.2 million in kickbacks on tax shelters he recommended to wealthy clients. He is cooperating with the government in the prosecution of John B. Ohle III, a Chicago tax specialist indicted in November for conspiring with lawyers at Jenkens & Gilchrist to defraud the IRS with bogus tax shelters.

Georgia Judge James Bodiford on Saturday morning gave Brian Nichols — who unsuccessfully argued that insanity drove him to murder a judge, a court reporter and two law enforcement officers — four sentences of life without parole, plus 485 years and seven more sentences of life in prison. A disappointed Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard suggested that if federal prosecutors tried Nichols for his slaying of customs agent David Wilhelm, Nichols could ultimately be sentenced to death.