Posts on ‘July 15th, 2009’

Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson has sued the National Arbitration Forum, the largest U.S. arbitration company for consumer credit disputes, alleging that the dispute resolution entity didn’t disclose “extensive ties to the collection industry.” Swanson’s office alleged the NAF secretly worked alongside creditors, and against consumer interests, in seeking to have mandatory, predispute arbitration clauses inserted in credit agreements signed by consumers and potentially arbitrated by the company.

Sonia Sotomayor’s first job out of Yale Law School was as a state prosecutor in Manhattan. For her second job, she said Wednesday that she purposefully avoided Big Law. “Unlike some of my law school friends, I very much wanted to go into a small law firm,” Sotomayor told senators on day three of her confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court. She added, “I thought, when I left the District Attorney’s Office, ‘I don’t think I can go to those firms where I would be the fifth guy on the totem pole.’”

Although the underlying facts in the cases against executives differ from those against athletes, executives can gain some valuable insights into their own risks, and into ways to protect against those risks, by reading about the prosecutions of athletes, especially the highly publicized prosecution of Barry Bonds, says attorney Michael J. Shepard. However, few executives get the level of hero worship that 762 homers brings, so they should appreciate that their road may be rougher than his.

If you use Microsoft Outlook and your e-mail has become a burden to manage, it might be time to try an e-mail organizer like Caelo Software’s NEO Pro. Legal Technology Editor Sean Doherty takes a hard look at NEO Pro as a tool that promises to quickly bring order to your Outlook mail.

In a closely watched case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that a young boy who was exposed to lead paint cannot sue the manufacturers for defectively designing a key ingredient. The court on Wednesday affirmed the decisions of both lower courts in granting a motion to dismiss the claims, which were brought against E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., the Sherwin-Williams Co., Armstrong Containers Inc. and American Cyanamid Co. The case attracted amicus briefs from a number of business groups.

Morgan, Lewis & Bockius canceled its 2010 summer associate program on Tuesday, the first big firm to publicly do so. Firm Chairman Francis Milone addressed attorneys and staff via videoconference to inform them of the change of plans. Milone also detailed other cost-cutting measures, including a decision to eliminate lockstep compensation in favor of a performance-based system. The firm did not detail changes to its compensation and advancement structure.

Under sharp questioning from Senate Republicans on Tuesday, U.S. Supreme
Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor insisted that she brings “an open mind” to
judging, while acknowledging that some of her past statements suggesting
otherwise amounted to a “rhetorical flourish that fell flat.”
Sotomayor’s calm, painstaking responses seemed to take the sting and
energy out of the questioning from Republicans, and, if nothing else,
may have refuted claims that Sotomayor lacks a judicial temperament.

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.