Posts on ‘May 21st, 2009’

Reed Smith has joined a small but growing group of large law firms that have decided to cut associate salaries as one way of adjusting to the economic downturn. The firm, as first reported on the blog Above the Law, said in a memo Wednesday that it would cut all existing U.S. associates’ salaries by 10 percent effective July 1. In the memo, Reed Smith said that it has also lowered compensation levels for partners as a response to the recession.

How one in-house counsel approaches outside law firms may very well summarize the state of today’s legal economy. “I have to personally reduce outside counsel costs,” said Michelle L. Meiselman, assistant GC for Akzo Nobel. “If I don’t, then it comes out of my bonus — if there are bonuses this year.” Another in-house lawyer and law firm attorneys at a recent panel discussion agreed that cost cutting for outside counsel services to corporations has reached unprecedented levels this year.

Companies have many options to generate, receive, store and retrieve voicemail messages — all in digital format. While more efficient and flexible, these options raise a number of issues involving the obligation to preserve, search and disclose voicemail messages relevant to litigation.

When a federal judge said during a panel discussion this week that some female attorneys need to dress more appropriately for court — mentioning one woman attired as though she had stopped in “on her way home from the gym” — she probably didn’t realize she’d opened some floodgates. As it turned out, a male judge and some male lawyers in the audience also had plenty to say on the issue. One such complaint, from a male judge, involved women who wear “blouses so short there’s no way the judges wouldn’t look.”

Lawyers for former InterMune CEO Scott Harkonen argued Wednesday that
when Harkonen sent out a press release in 2003 describing an InterMune
medication as a lifesaver — even though the FDA said it really wasn’t
– he was engaged in a scientific debate protected by the First
Amendment and should not have been criminally charged for fraud. Federal
Judge Marilyn Hall Patel has yet to rule, but, so far, she doesn’t
appear to be buying the Harkonen line.

Just weeks after pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges for operating a Manhattan-based call-girl ring, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Bergrin was indicted Wednesday for leading a racketeering conspiracy that arranged the murder of a witness in one drug case and attempted to kill an informant in another. The 14-count indictment charges that Bergrin engaged in a host of illegal activities from his Newark, N.J., law office, including witness tampering, wire fraud, money laundering and drug trafficking.