Posts on ‘June 19th, 2009’

Allen & Overy, Berwin Leighton Paisner. and Norton Rose have emerged as standouts in a Legal Week project grading law firms on their lawyers’ satisfaction. The survey identified the trio as top performers among the 25 largest U.K. law firms. CMS Cameron McKenna and Bird & Bird placed in the top five. The ranking is based on core criteria that respondents identified as most important to them, including a firm’s prestige, work/life balance and partnership prospects.

Greenberg Traurig is on a shopping spree. Always one for recruiting partners away from rivals, the firm this year already has hired 45 lateral partners, almost as many as the 51 it hired in all of 2008. The latest get: former Mayer Brown vice chairman Paul Maher, who will establish a London operation. Richard Rosenbaum, Greenberg’s president who will become CEO in January, says the firm has grown largely through lateral hires, rather than mergers, because of the firm’s commitment to a meritocracy.

If you want to increase your network, boost your productivity and develop your book of business, consultant Neen James says you can achieve those goals by getting familiar with LinkedIn and using it in your everyday interactions with colleagues and clients. James provides some productivity tips to get the most out of LinkedIn. For instance, she notes you can use LinkedIn as a research tool by posing a question to selected people in your network, which she says works well because it allows for a quick response.

BDO International should not be required to pay any part of a $170 million award granted in a previous trial against BDO Seidman for audits that failed to spot the largest bank fraud in Miami history, a jury decided Thursday. Jurors deliberated for just one hour before deciding that Chicago-based BDO Seidman was not an agent of Belgium-based BDO International, which argued it did not control, oversee or monitor independent accounting firms around the globe sharing the BDO name.

Criminal defendants have no federal constitutional right of access to DNA evidence after they are convicted, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. By a 5-4 vote, the Court concluded that establishing rules on DNA evidence should be the job of legislators, not justices. The ruling may have largely symbolic meaning, sending a mixed message about how the high court regards the power of DNA evidence, which has been available for more than 20 years and has recently exonerated more than 200 people.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t pick sides in the kerfuffle between Travelers Indemnity counsel Barry Ostrager of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett and the firm that he said offered “the worst advice any lawyer ever gave a client,” Cozen O’Connor, the high court on Thursday gave Ostrager the win that really mattered, finding that Travelers is protected from asbestos-related suits by an order of the bankruptcy judge who approved the 1986 Johns-Manville asbestos trust. The ruling, however, was narrowly tailored.

The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with a former Enron Corp. executive in a ruling that makes it unlikely he can be tried a second time on charges related to financial fraud at the one-time energy giant. The issue before the Court was whether a variation on the Constitution’s guarantee against double jeopardy applies when the jury votes not guilty on some charges, but fails to reach a verdict on others that are based upon the same essential facts as the charges that resulted in acquittal.

An Alabama state court judge has declared that the corporate fraud committed by former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy entitles the health care services company to recover $2.88 billion from the now imprisoned Scrushy. The judgment ends a seven-year-long case involving a suit that HealthSouth shareholders filed on behalf of the company. Scrushy, who is serving a prison sentence on an unrelated bribery charge, maintained that he didn’t know of the fraud at HealthSouth. His lead attorney said he will appeal.

Clifford Chance’s attempt to save its U.S. litigation group stands as a cautionary tale of how firms can make a bad situation worse. What started as strategic moves to shed litigators seems to have turned into an unintended decimation of virtually the entire New York litigation team. Juan Morillo, who has been tapped to run the firm’s U.S. litigation practice, says Clifford Chance is “absolutely committed to rebuilding in New York. But we’re realistic about the challenge and know that it will take more than 12 months.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the construction of what it claims are draconian isolation housing units tucked inside an Indiana federal prison, designed specifically to keep close tabs on suspected terrorists. The ACLU claims the units were unlawfully built without any public input, and they’re disproportionately filled by Muslim prisoners, many of whom have never been convicted of terrorism-related crimes.