Posts on ‘March 13th, 2009’

The Senate voted 65-28 Thursday to confirm David Ogden as deputy attorney general, pushing aside criticism of his clients in private practice. A partner at WilmerHale since 2001, Ogden will be the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, responsible for the DOJ’s day-to-day operations. Criticism of Ogden has focused on his early work at WilmerHale in obscenity-related First Amendment cases, in which his clients included librarians, booksellers and magazine.

A judge’s decision to vacate a defendant’s sentence because his lawyer gave an unreasonably sunny assessment of his chances to win an acquittal at trial has been reversed by the 2nd Circuit. The court said it decided on direct appeal in 2001 that it was the defendant’s lies to his own lawyer that led counsel to proceed to trial with high hopes of winning, and that the district court judge was essentially, and impermissibly, treading the same legal ground when he granted the defendant’s habeas petition in 2005.

Federal authorities are looking at Judge Michael Toole as part of their investigation into alleged corruption at the Luzerne County Courthouse, sources confirm. The investigation appears to stem from an allegation that Toole may have gotten a payment from attorney Robert Powell. Feds have previously charged that former Judges Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan accepted more than $2.6 million in kickbacks from Powell and another source while Powell was one of the owners of a private juvenile detention facility.

Jurors shouldn’t have awarded money to a south Louisiana couple for their allegation that State Farm Fire and Casualty acted in bad faith when it denied their homeowner claim after Hurricane Katrina, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday. The ruling vacates a portion of a 2007 judgment that awarded Michael and Judy Kodrin about $356,000 in damages and penalties, plus attorney fees. The appeals court upheld a jury’s decision that State Farm owed the couple about $200,000 for wind damage.

A New York premarital agreement signed by an heir to the Hermes fortune is valid, even though a subsequent French agreement the couple signed may have failed to include exclusions anticipated by the initial agreement, a Manhattan judge has held. Mathias Guerrand-Hermes argued that the court should throw out the New York prenuptial on the grounds of “mutual mistake,” but the judge ruled that any potential mistake occurred after the first agreement was ratified, and therefore had no bearing on its validity.

Norton Rose is set to institute a radical flex-work plan as the London law firm moves to head off job cuts. If approved, the groundbreaking measure, which would include partners, would see staff earn 85 percent of their salary for a four-day workweek, while sabbatical leave of four to 12 weeks would be paid out at 30 percent of base salary. Norton Rose is one of the few top 50 U.K. law firms to avoid formal layoffs so far.

The law firm layoff carnage continued on Thursday, with at least four firms handing out pink slips to attorneys and staffers. Sidley Austin made the biggest cut of the day, laying off 89 associates and staff attorneys, as well as about 140 staffers in its U.S. offices. The firm is expecting its work slowdown to continue for 12 to 18 months. Philadelphia-based Blank Rome confirmed that it cut 27 associate and 52 staff positions. Baker Botts in Houston and Gardere Wynne Sewell in Dallas also felt the layoff pain.