Posts on ‘May 18th, 2009’

A new chapter has opened in a lawsuit brought by the co-op board of Manhattan’s Trump Plaza seeking to evict Donald Trump’s company. Never known as one to back down from a fight, Trump and company have fired back. In a new suit, Trump’s lawyers accuse the cooperative of shoddy repairs to roofs and drain lines that allowed water to infiltrate two townhouses it rented. Trump’s lawyer also claims the earlier suit is inaccurate, as Trump has paid the rent. Trump’s suit seeks more than $18 million in damages.

Just as Bernie Madoff seemed to be gracing fewer front pages, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s inspector general dealt another blow to the agency’s lawyers. According to the IG’s report, one lawyer in the division of enforcement and one in the chief counsel’s office are being investigated by the FBI for possible insider trading. Perhaps even more embarrassing, the report finds that there is “essentially no compliance system in place” to ensure that SEC employees are not trading on nonpublic information.

IP, frequently considered a recession-proof practice, took another hit last week when Boston-based IP firm Fish & Richardson cut 35 lawyers and 85 support staff, slashing its head count by more than 7 percent. A study this month by BTI Consulting Group found that a majority of 370 corporate counsel at Fortune 1000 companies were planning to cut IP litigation spending by more than 7 percent. With patent cases taking longer, firms are becoming less willing to invest in expensive litigation.

As a cultural icon, Woody Allen has few modern peers. But is his image, used briefly in billboard ads for clothing company American Apparel in New York and Los Angeles, worth $10 million? A jury will have to answer that question in a trial set to begin today in Manhattan federal court. The tabloid-ready case pits Allen against a company known for risque ads and the alleged sexual escapades of its founder, Dov Charney. The ads featured photos of Allen dressed as an orthodox Jew from his movie “Annie Hall.”

The receiver appointed to take over the companies owned by Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford filed a request Friday for nearly $20 million in attorney fees. The money would be paid from funds formerly controlled by Stanford’s companies, the same funds that would pay back any potentially defrauded investors. Receiver Ralph Janvey heads up a huge team of lawyers and financial experts from 14 firms trying to track down money from what the government has alleged is a “massive Ponzi scheme.”

In a harshly worded order, a federal judge has tossed a securities fraud case against the now-defunct Washington Mutual, describing plaintiffs’ pleadings as “verbose” and “disorganized.” Last year, Bernstein Litowtiz filed a 388-page consolidated complaint on behalf of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board in the class action, which named former WaMu officers and directors, underwriters and the auditing firm Deloitte & Touche. The suit alleged that shareholders were misled about the company’s financial results.

Richard Scrushy’s federal criminal trial, which ended in his acquittal, was an entertaining, white-collar whodunit with everything from a courtroom prayer circle to a big cartoon rat. Four years later, the civil trial of a shareholder lawsuit seeking $2.6 billion from the disgraced HealthSouth Corp. chief executive isn’t making nearly the same splash. There are few fireworks and no crowds this time, despite the huge amount of money at stake in the trial that started last week.

Across the country, major law firms have cut their summer programs, some by a week or two and others by significantly more. For the summer associates, it means less money in their pockets, since top firms pay summer associates in the ballpark of $3,000 a week. Lawyers, legal consultants and law school career services administrators also warn that because shorter programs give law firms less time to gauge who should receive a job offer, law students face added pressure to prove themselves quickly.

It’s a white-collar worker’s nightmare: giving a presentation that gets you fired. It happened to the chief financial officer of Motorola Inc. this year. And the lawsuit he filed afterward provides a rare peek into dysfunctional relationships at the top of a major company. Motorola has gone so far as to claim it fired the CFO “for cause” — a term often reserved for suspected embezzlers — while the former executive says he was canned for blowing the whistle on major problems.

In a decision likely to increase the pressure on President Barack Obama to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, the justices ruled Monday that employers may give less credit for long-ago pregnancy leave than for other medical leave in calculating pension benefits. The 7-2 decision in AT&T Corp. v. Hulteen focuses on the way in which employers calculated the effect of pregnancy leave on pension accruals before passage in 1978 of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.