Posts on ‘July 14th, 2009’

First came the warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration; now it’s lawsuits. Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals has been hit with four individual federal lawsuits involving the safety of its popular birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin. Vowing that plenty more lawsuits are in the pipeline, plaintiffs lawyers say an FDA letter warning Bayer about its product ads will be handy evidence. Bayer is currently running a corrective ad campaign about the benefits and risks of Yaz.

An inappropriate question by a California patent lawyer during jury selection has earned him a potential 48-hour jail sentence for contempt of court. John van Loben Sels, a partner at Wang, Hartmann, Gibbs & Cauley, tried to prejudice the jury, the judge ruled, in a patent case between client Beyond Innovation Technology Co. and O2 Micro. A veteran patent and ethics lawyer with Townsend and Townsend and Crew said he couldn’t think of another patent case where a lawyer was held in criminal contempt.

After 39 years of litigation, court supervision over the School District of Philadelphia’s efforts to achieve parity in educational opportunities for students of all racial backgrounds ended Monday when a judge gave approval to a settlement of a court case filed in 1970 to force the school district to desegregate. The case centered on the achievement gap between white schoolchildren and minority schoolchildren and the disparities in resources provided by the school district in “racially isolated” schools.

The California Supreme Court has denied a petition to review an asbestos liability case in which a Los Angeles judge blasted the plaintiff’s firm, Waters & Kraus, for engaging in a “type of judicially sanctioned extortion.” Meanwhile, the firm’s managing partner says, “The trial judge in his order cast some aspersions on us and our conduct, and invited the court to reconsider this on appeal. But the intermediate appeal court and the Supreme Court declined to do that and reaffirmed that what we did was entirely proper.”

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, which formally launched its U.S. litigation practice in January, has just added a new hire: David Onorato, the former deputy general counsel for Bank of America. Onorato, who was let go in December from Bank of America amid its restructuring and integration with Merrill Lynch, said that, despite the tough economic environment, a global firm capable of working on high-end, multi-jurisdictional work “might be having its moment in time.”

When five attorneys from Clifford Chance formed the boutique litigation firm Chaffetz Lindsey, they needed a level of IT support common in large firms, but on a smaller scale with smaller costs. The firm turned to a managed service provider and software as a service to fulfill its IT needs.

A compromise between the U.S. Justice Department and Swiss banking behemoth UBS in their dispute over the release of 52,000 names of U.S. account holders most likely would focus on the more egregious violators who used corporations and foundations to cheat the Internal Revenue Service, tax experts said Monday. A settlement would allow the IRS to avoid a protracted legal fight, which could delay the IRS’ primary objective of collecting taxes on an estimated $17 billion in hidden assets.

Seven months after he was arrested for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars and stealing from clients, disgraced attorney Marc S. Dreier was ordered to serve 20 years in prison Monday. “At this point all I can do is express my shame and remorse,” Dreier told New York federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff. “I’m sorry to all the people I stole from. I’m sorry to the clients I betrayed. I’m sorry to the lawyers at my law firm for dishonoring their profession.”