Posts on ‘July 2nd, 2009’

A disbarred lawyer who has left New York and avoided serving a 30-day contempt of court sentence may not testify by video teleconference in a bankruptcy proceeding in Manhattan to avoid possible arrest should he testify in person, a Southern District Bankruptcy Court judge has ruled. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stuart M. Bernstein denied the teleconference request of Kenneth Heller, finding the proffered excuse of fear of arrest to be “neither good nor compelling.”

Alston & Bird is cutting associate pay by $5,000 across the board for the remainder of the year — a reduction equal to about 7 percent of annual starting pay. The cuts, effective July 15, follow other cost-saving measures undertaken by the firm since the end of last year, including staff and associate layoffs, early retirement packages for senior staff, a reduction in its summer program and a deferred start date for its new first-year class.

For all the talk about change, corporate counsel are finding it hard to believe that outside firms are serious about rethinking their approach to client service and billing. In a survey by Altman Weil, 75 percent of the responding chief legal officers rated their law firms between zero to four on a 10-point scale, indicating their opinion that firms had little or no interest in change. “This is a dramatic vote of no confidence from chief legal officers,” Altman Weil Principal Daniel J. DiLucchio Jr. said.

Reed Smith hadn’t invested enough in information infrastructure and processes such as document retrieval were taking too long. To take control of its data before it took hold of them, the firm implemented Recommind’s MindServer Search platform as its knowledge management base.

The Michigan Supreme Court has come down hard on gadget-happy jurors, banning all electronic communications by jurors during trial, including tweets on Twitter, text messages and Google searches. The ruling, which takes effect Sept. 1, will require Michigan judges for the first time to instruct jurors not to use any hand-held device, such as iPhones or BlackBerrys, while in the jury box or during deliberations. The state’s high court issued the new rule on Tuesday in response to prosecutors’ complaints.

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe dumped lockstep associate promotion on Wednesday and began assigning associates to one of three tiers within its partner track: associate, managing associate or senior associate. Orrick will also create a nonpartner-track option for associates, and boost the number of staff attorneys doing more routine work like document review. Orrick Chairman Ralph Baxter Jr. said the moves are meant to create a system in which clients aren’t paying for unnecessary costs.

A year ago, Lehman Brothers appeared solvent, Bernard Madoff was a trusted name and the global economic crisis was still called a downturn. Even then, pro bono advocates worried that altruism would be a casualty of hard times at the country’s top law firms. Judging by firms’ performance last year, those fears may have been unfounded. As a group, the nation’s 200 highest-grossing firms devoted more hours to pro bono than ever.

In April the Environmental Protection Agency started a process that will allow it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles, and it’s expected to soon do the same for emissions from factories, power plants and other industrial facilities. But before any new regulatory scheme becomes official, businesses need to determine how their operations might be affected. So in-house lawyers are working closely with engineers and consultants to assess the size and scope of their companies’ emissions.