Posts on ‘December 29th, 2008’

An arbitration clause in a commercial contract expires when the contract does and cannot be enforced merely because the parties continue to do business under the same terms, a federal judge has ruled. The judge refused to extend the holding of a 1994 decision by the 3rd Circuit that said an arbitration clause may survive the expiration of a collective bargaining agreement. Instead, the judge concluded that the 3rd Circuit’s decision was a narrow one and that its holding applies only in the labor context.

A lawyer who sent his paralegal to a court hearing where she advocated for a client should be censured, a New Jersey disciplinary board said in an opinion released Tuesday. The sanction was one step up from the reprimand that an ethics committee recommended for Neal Pomper, who was found by both the committee and the board to have breached conduct rules involving assisting the unauthorized practice of law or inducing someone else to do so.

Any hope that the California Supreme Court might resolve a politically sensitive imbroglio over extra judicial benefits dissipated last week when the high court refused to review the case that stirred things up. The Supreme Court’s decision to not take up lets stand a lower court ruling that could void Los Angeles County’s 20-year practice of supplementing judges’ $178,000 salaries and state-provided benefits with perks that amounted to almost $50,000 a year.

Citing a legislative drafting glitch, a New York judge has thrown out the top two charges in a 15-count fraud indictment against a former executive of the largest Medicaid managed-care provider in the state. Acting Supreme Court Justice Lewis Bart Stone dismissed counts of first-degree insurance fraud against James Boothe of Healthfirst, which settled civil charges in September by paying $35 million and revamping its management. However, Boothe still faces a top sentence of 1 1/3 to four years in prison.

Rahm Emanuel, the incoming White House chief of staff, has hired Debevoise & Plimpton’s W. Neil Eggleston for defense counsel in the scandal surrounding Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Valerie Jarrett, set to be a senior adviser in the Obama White House, has hired Mayer Brown’s Vincent Connelly. Prosecutors have not accused either Emanuel or Jarrett of wrongdoing.

A judge has ordered Ford Motor to start discussing settlement of a lawsuit filed on behalf of employees who had company stock as a retirement investment. The suit claims Ford failed to inform participants of a “myriad of systemic, internal and marketplace problems … which threatened the viability of the company,” affecting the stock value. From April 2000 to April 2006, the stock fell approximately 70 percent. A similar lawsuit involving GM employees and company stock settled this year for $37.5 million.

President-elect Barack Obama continues to announce new staff members, and among them are a few more Washington lawyers. Cassandra Butts, who has known Obama since Harvard Law School, will be deputy White House counsel. She is currently general counsel for the transition. Shawn Maher, a longtime aide to Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., will be Obama’s deputy director of legislative affairs for the Senate. Most recently, he served as staff director and general counsel to the Senate Banking Committee.

LexisNexis Group’s Martindale-Hubbell has no plans to abandon its lawyer ratings, the company insists in response to blog postings about its layoff of attorney rating specialists. However, a LexisNexis spokesman confirmed the company has laid off three specialists and said the company will change the way it gathers the information underpinning the ratings.

When Navy general counsel Frank Jimenez decided it was time to get a rare posthumous presidential pardon for Charles Winters, who had been convicted of supplying Israel with B-17 bombers in the 1940s, he did what any smart lawyer would do: He reached out to the connections he made while working as GC to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and while working for Sen. Mel Martinez. Wilmer partner Reginald Brown was among those who helped to secure the second ever posthumous pardon.