Posts on ‘May 27th, 2009’

The door to a fifth of the world’s wealth isn’t behind any double-combination vault. It can be found in a Bahamian strip mall, along a dusty road in Tortola, or at the notorious four-story Ugland House in the Cayman Islands, the registered address of more than 12,000 offshore companies. Now the U.S. is going after UBS, Europe’s biggest bank, which has used Caribbean tax havens to get around a 2001 accord with the IRS that would force the disclosure of its U.S. customer base.

If a law firm associate in one practice area bills at a significantly higher rate than a same-year associate in another practice area, shouldn’t he or she make more money? Philadelphia’s Post & Schell thinks so. Since 2000, it has favored an associate compensation system that focuses on each attorney’s ability to generate revenue for the firm. Breaking out of the lockstep model, the firm provides the highest associate salaries to attorneys working in practice areas that bill at the highest rates.

Far too many lawyers devote a large amount of time to presenting business pitches in front of in-house counsel, but fail to differentiate themselves in any significant way, says legal consultant and former general counsel Frank M. D’Amore. At the least, presentations that miss the mark won’t help in-house counsel in their selection process, but at the worst, firms can ruin their relationship with a client. D’Amore provides three suggestions to help attorneys impress in-house counsel without trying so hard.

A federal jury in Atlanta has awarded Lockheed Martin $37.3 million for defense contractor L-3 Communications’ misappropriation of trade secrets associated with the design and construction of Lockheed’s anti-submarine bomber, which is used by navies around the world. “Trade secrets protection for information that is disclosed to the U.S. government really hasn’t been addressed in many issues. It’s pretty groundbreaking,” said a Kilpatrick Stockton partner on Lockheed’s legal team.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear Merck & Co.’s challenge to a shareholder suit linked to litigation over the painkiller Vioxx. Company lawyers say the suit was filed outside the two-year statute of limitations and should not be permitted to go forward. The 3rd Circuit last year reversed a trial judge’s dismissal of the suit. At issue in the case are so-called “storm warnings” — the point at which the investor has received notice of the alleged wrongdoing and the window for bringing a suit begins.

As President Barack Obama introduced Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the nation as his Supreme Court nominee, Justice Antonin Scalia, sitting on the high court bench, read parts of a 5-4 decision overruling a 23-year-old precedent barring police from initiating interrogation of a defendant once he or she has asked for a lawyer at an arraignment or a similar proceeding. It was business as usual for the justices Tuesday, but also a reminder of the importance of one vote on a Court closely divided in key areas of law.

In one of the first decisions to interpret the scope of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a federal judge has refused to apply the law’s relaxed time limits to failure-to-promote claims. Finding that Congress explicitly limited the new law to claims of “discrimination in compensation,” Judge Berle Schiller rejected the argument that a woman who claims she was illegally denied a series of promotions should be allowed, under a “continuing violation” theory, to pursue a Title VII lawsuit over all of the adverse decisions.

Remember Judge Jed Rakoff’s shock at the revelation that Coughlin Stoia monitors the investment portfolios of pension fund clients for litigation opportunities? On Tuesday, Rakoff issued an opinion explaining why he picked a Mississippi pension fund represented by Coughlin rival Bernstein Litowitz as lead plaintiff in a securities class action against Merrill Lynch — even though Bernstein’s client has a similar monitoring deal with 12 law firms. Rakoff called it “a choice between two less-than-perfect plaintiffs.”

The buzz in the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan on Tuesday was about President Barack Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. But in courtroom 15A, jurors got a crash course in leveraged buyouts and law firm economics. The case: USA v. Joseph P. Collins. The defendant: a Mayer Brown corporate partner charged by federal prosecutors with concealing a $2.4 billion corporate fraud that led to the collapse of commodities dealer Refco in 2005.

Mortgage-related lawsuits are on the rise, with homeowners and investors alike suing over allegedly being duped by the mortgage industry. According to a litigation report from MortgageDaily.com, an online mortgage news analyst, the number of mortgage-related lawsuits filed in the first quarter of this year jumped to 81, a more than 50 percent increase from the 50 cases tracked during the same quarter in 2008.