Posts on ‘January 9th, 2009’

A lawyer who married a woman 19 years his junior while he was still married to another woman should not have been given the go-ahead to foreclose on a condominium he bought for her, a split New York appeals panel ruled Thursday. The majority found that the question of whether solo Joseph I. Rosenzweig loaned or gave the woman money for the condo needed closer scrutiny. The dissenting judge wrote that an observer could see the majority’s motivation as “a desire to punish the plaintiff for being a scoundrel.”

An Alabama sheriff was in federal custody Thursday after a judge ruled he purposely fed inmates skimpy meals so he could make money from a system that lets sheriffs turn a profit on their jail kitchens. Sheriff Greg Bartlett testified he made $212,000 by cheaply feeding prisoners — every cent of it legal under a Depression-era law and reported on his taxes as income. But a federal judge ordered marshals to arrest Bartlett after hearing prisoners testify they were given paper-thin bologna, bloody chicken and cold grits.

An attorney disbarred for failing to pay sanctions and fees in a lawsuit to recover damages for Holocaust survivors from Austrian and German banks has sued a federal judge claiming bias and favoritism in the appointment of special masters and committee members. Edward D. Fagan was disbarred in December for failing to pay the Bank of Austria $350,000 in fees as well as more than $20,000 in sanctions in Holocaust survivor cases.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey ruled Wednesday that aliens have no constitutional right to challenge the outcome of their deportation hearings based on their lawyers’ mistakes. The opinion, which is binding on the nation’s 53 immigration courts, does not rule out aliens succeeding on claims of ineffective assistance, but it is expected to sharply reduce their chances. Aliens must show that their attorneys’ failings were “egregious” and that they likely affected the outcome of the case.

Kirkland & Ellis is edging some senior associates and income partners toward the door as part of its regular annual evaluation process, perhaps being carried out with a bit more gusto given the difficult economic times. The Chicago-based firm has asked the lawyers to look for other work in the wake of the reviews and as the economy slows work in some areas, said Chicago-based legal recruiters who have heard from some of the attorneys.

The New York state Commission on Judicial Conduct has admonished a Rochester City Court judge for soliciting, from the bench, support from an attorney for the judge’s Supreme Court candidacy moments before she presided over a case involving the attorney’s client. The commission also announced Thursday the admonishment of an Oneida County Family Court judge who threatened to hold two child advocacy officers and their agency in contempt.

Baker & McKenzie has announced redundancies, cutting six of its New York associates as a result of the ongoing economic downturn. The international firm’s New York office houses around 140 lawyers, including 60 partners. The firm says the layoffs are part of a range of cost-cutting measures introduced in response to market conditions.

Three years after the murders of a Chicago federal judge’s husband and mother, and the courthouse shooting of a Georgia state judge and his court reporter, judicial security in states remains fragmented and uneven — and the bad economy may slow planned upgrades. “Some courts have been crime scenes and not refuges,” California Chief Justice Ronald George says, pointing to the problem of old courthouses in which guards escort prisoners down the same halls as witnesses, jurors and the public.

New York lawyer Emanuel Zeltser awoke on a private plane headed for a KGB-monitored detention center in Belarus last March. His last memory before waking was drinking coffee at a London cafe. Since then, he’s been held at three prison facilities in the former Soviet country, deprived of medications and physically tortured. He is now languishing in a KGB penal colony. It sounds like a nightmare, but these are the details in a complaint filed by Patton Boggs lawyers with the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

In 2008, e-discovery saw its most active year to date, with opinions ranging from meet-and-confers to issues in search and retrieval. Ryely Carlock’s Cecil Lynn III and Alexander Hicks review the cases and predict what the new year promises for electronically stored information.