Posts on ‘June 1st, 2009’

Absent a settlement, a jury to be selected beginning Tuesday in lower Manhattan will be asked to reach a historic verdict that would make Royal Dutch/Shell the first foreign corporation found liable in a U.S. courtroom for aiding and abetting human rights violations by the forces of a foreign nation. The plaintiffs are the families of seven Nigerians who were executed by the former military regime in Nigeria for protests against Shell’s oil exploration and development activities.

With all the lateral movement over the past few months, we’d like to believe all the partings have been amicable, but we know breakups aren’t always easy. The Am Law Daily asked McDermott Will & Emery partner William Schuman, chairman of the firm’s professional responsibility committee, how to make a graceful exit. Schuman says, “The first thing to remember is you’re not allowed to solicit clients or the associates of your firm while you’re still there. You can’t take stuff that doesn’t belong to you.”

Many large law firms may be paying young lawyers to stay away, but one small firm associate had to work to get his firm’s OK to take this summer off. Myles Solomon, a fifth-year at Bassi Edlin Huie & Blum, who also started a sports agency co-owned by the firm partners, will be leaving this month to volunteer in Africa for three months. Managing partner Noel Edlin says that allowing the sabbatical means a trade-off in extra hours for other lawyers, who have to use nonbillable time to learn Solomon’s cases.

After a season of layoffs and furloughs, most of the largest private New York law offices also have reduced the size of their incoming summer associate classes. According to the New York Law Journal’s annual survey of the top 25 largest law offices in New York, some of the biggest cuts were made in firms that had already reduced their work force during the past year. “Historically, the game was kind of the other way, we wanted to see as many people as possible,” said Cadwalader’s New York hiring committee chair.

Samuel B. Kent is set to report to federal prison on June 15, but even before the disgraced retired U.S. district judge begins to serve a 33-month sentence, the U.S. House will crank into high gear proceedings that could lead to Kent’s impeachment. Kent, as well as the two former staff members he has admitted to sexually assaulting as part of a guilty plea to obstruction of justice, reportedly will testify at an evidentiary hearing Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee Task Force on Impeachment.

Europe may not have a class action mechanism, but a securities fraud settlement approved Friday by a Dutch court comes pretty darn close. The Amsterdam Court of Appeals issued a binding declaration ordering Royal Dutch Shell to begin payment of $381 million to a foundation representing a group of more than 150 institutional investors from 17 European countries, plus Canada and Australia. The settlement resolves securities fraud claims stemming from Shell’s overstatement of its proven oil and gas reserves.

The legal battle between former Covington & Burling staff attorney Yolanda Young and the law firm came to an abrupt halt Friday, when a federal judge dismissed the case after Young and her lawyer failed to show up in court. Young had alleged that the firm discriminated against its black lawyers and that she was the target of racially insensitive remarks and suffered retaliation when she complained. She wrote about her time at Covington in an essay on the Huffington Post titled “Law Firm Segregation Reminiscent of Jim Crow.”

The Washington Independent reports that several law firms, including Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, appear to have conflicts of interest by doing bailout work and representing banking clients despite Treasury Department contracts forbidding the practice. The Am Law Daily made some calls of its own about another firm — Squire, Sanders & Dempsey — and concludes that the conflicts question doesn’t look so cut-and-dried.

Two former Thelen employees are throwing in the towel after their attorney was accused of trying to get a piece of the action too many times. Cary Kletter filed three similar complaints in two courts and tried to intervene in a fourth case, but attorneys for Thelen threatened to seek sanctions, saying he was bogging down the courts so he could rack up fees for himself. Late Friday, Kletter said his clients, at the request of Thelen, had decided not to pursue the case, which would likely be “resolved or dismissed soon.”

In 92 pages last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dug into one of the largest civil racketeering cases the Justice Department has ever brought: the mail and wire fraud suit against major cigarette manufacturers. The appeals court’s opinion in U.S. v. Philip Morris USA largely upheld a landmark ruling against a group of tobacco companies for a decades-long conspiracy to dupe consumers about the health effects of smoking. But the judgment on that judgment has been mixed.