Posts on ‘February 10th, 2009’

The number of deferred and nonprosecution agreements between the U.S.
Department of Justice and corporations declined by 60 percent in 2008 –
from a historic high of 40 in 2007 to 16 last year, according to a
forthcoming study. Despite the lower numbers, violations of the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act continued to dominate the subject of those
corporate pretrial agreements, with seven of the 16 agreements last year
resolving FCPA violations.

When Google created Chrome, it wanted to see what would happen if a Web browser was built from scratch to exploit the interactivity of Web 2.0 — to “completely rethink the browser.” Consultant Brett Burney compares the souped-up Chrome with IE7 and Firefox to measure its success.

Guantanamo Bay was where George W. Bush went to avoid law, both international and domestic. Closing the detention center is an easy decision for President Barack Obama — and the executive order to close it within a year comes as no surprise. Then what? Constitutional lawyers are bitterly divided, and where they stand depends on whether they think U.S. courts are capable of trying terror suspects.

The day after Thanksgiving, James Christodoulou found himself in an impossible situation. The CEO of Stamford, Conn.-based Industrial Shipping Enterprises had just received word that a band of Somali pirates had boarded and hijacked one of his tankers — the Liberian-flagged MV Biscaglia — in the Gulf of Aden. Christodoulou turned to his company’s longtime outside counsel at Seward & Kissel for assistance in rescuing the ship’s 28-man crew and putting company investors at ease.

Choosing to make a lateral move is a difficult decision. Making a lateral move in a partnership year poses especially unique challenges. Attorney Meredith S. Auten successfully switched firms as an associate
in her eighth year of practice, and she was promoted to partner within a year of her move. She discusses her experience, including some of the pros and cons of such a move. She also provides some tips, including one of the most important things she learned, which she wishes she had done better.

This weekend’s news that New York Yankee star Alex Rodriguez allegedly tested positive for anabolic steroid use in 2003 has moved the steroids-in-baseball conversation beyond the eventual admissibility of evidence to whether the disclosure of supposedly secret test results could be a crime. A former prosecutor said he expects U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston to order criminal contempt hearings to determine who leaked the news of Rodriguez’s failed test.

Facebook paid the founders of ConnectU $65 million to settle lawsuits
accusing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for the
wildly successful social-networking Web site, according to a law firm’s
marketing brochure. Lawyers in the heavyweight fight had expended great
effort to keep the settlement secret, but ConnectU’s former lawyers from
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges published the amount in a firm
advertisement trumpeting the firm’s prowess. The disclosure was
apparently inadvertent.

One of the top cases of the current Supreme Court term is , asking whether a state law tort action challenging the
labeling on a Wyeth drug is pre-empted by federal law. Now, the outcome
of the case could be in question because of the recent announcement by
Pfizer Inc. that it would acquire Wyeth. Chief Justice John Roberts
Jr.’s ownership of Pfizer stock has prompted his recusal in previous
cases. The decision in the case is likely to affect Wyeth’s value, and,
in turn, Pfizer’s.

Some 200 GCs and human resource directors gathered in Washington, D.C., last week for a horror story. The tale — told by lawyers from Epstein Becker & Green — concerned employees, federal regulation and an expected wave of big-ticket litigation over issues like benefits, equal pay and layoffs. For employment lawyers, it’s certainly a happy day. But that doesn’t appear to give their in-house brethren much consolation. Several say they’re bulking up legal budgets for what’s coming down the pipeline.