Posts on ‘July 17th, 2009’

Los Angeles County Superior Court survived the first of 12 days of self-imposed job furloughs Wednesday. But that didn’t mean judges weren’t busy. “It was a long day yesterday,” said Presiding Judge Charles “Tim” McCoy, who began an arduous, daylong series of interviews with reporters at 3 a.m. The court, which faces an estimated shortfall of almost $138 million during the fiscal year that began on July 1, has taken the unprecedented step of voluntarily furloughing employees on the third Wednesday of each month.

In the wake of mass deferrals at law firms, Harvard Law School is advising first- and second-year law students to widen their search for summer associate positions. Considering law firms outside major metropolitan areas might be a smart way to stay in the game, according to the school. Meanwhile, the global practice group leader of Major, Lindsey and Africa’s associate group recommends that law students look for job opportunities in international offices for the summer.

A judge’s unusual $10 million defamation suit against attorney Ravi Batra for allegedly telling a New York Daily News columnist the judge improperly presided over a case involving a lawyer who represented the judge before a judicial conduct commission has been dismissed. However, a defamation claim has been allowed to proceed against the paper and columnist Errol Louis. The judge had claimed he was defamed by two articles and several blog postings about judicial corruption.

A Massachusetts judge on Wednesday struck down efforts by famed class action lawyer Frederick Furth to try to settle a wage-and-hour class action against Wal-Mart in that state. Furth had been accused by other plaintiffs lawyers in the case of going behind their backs to try to strike a collusive deal with Wal-Mart’s lawyers from Greenberg Traurig. Furth denied the accusation and asserted that he had negotiated an excellent settlement proposal for the class that was worth $20 million to $40 million.

The packed house during Thursday’s oral arguments in the Tiffany v. eBay appeal showed how high the stakes are in the case, which has attracted a large number of amicus briefs. Much of the discussion involved the relevance of the Supreme Court’s Inwood v. Ives ruling on third-party liability for infringement. Noting the changes in retail and technology in the 27 years since that decision, Judge Barrington Parker said, “When Inwood was written, what’s going on now was in the realm of science fiction.”

John Yoo, author of some of the Bush administration’s war-on-terror memos, has hired Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Miguel Estrada to appeal a ruling that allowed an allegedly mistreated detainee’s suit against Yoo. The Justice Department, which recently announced in a court filing that its lawyers were no longer representing Yoo, said it will still pay for Yoo’s defense, “as is normal practice when the potential exists for disagreement between the government and the defendant over complex legal questions.”

A law firm has no vicarious liability for alleged malpractice for work done by a contract partner under a private arrangement with a client, a New Jersey appeals court ruled on Thursday. The decision came in a 10-year-old suit seeking millions of dollars from Newark, N.J.’s Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross on account of alleged malpractice by former judge and Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano, who was with the firm in 1997 and 1998.

Call it patent karma. Ten years ago, Amazon.com riled the tech world when it sued Barnes & Noble for infringing its patent on “1-click” buying. Critics cried that clicking once to order a book wasn’t really an invention — and certainly not worthy of a patent. It became the poster child for a patent system gone overboard. Now, Amazon is defending itself against Cordance Corp., a company that claims it filed for its patent on 1-click ordering before Amazon’s application.

The Virginia State Bar’s standing committee on unauthorized practice of law stopped conducting undercover investigations years ago out of concern that the practice might violate ethical constraints against deceit and misrepresentation. Now the Bar’s legal ethics committee has issued a formal opinion clearing the way for investigators once again to engage in sting operations when there is no other feasible way to investigate a complaint that a non-lawyer is practicing law.

Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, who was also a Republican member of Congress for 17 years, will join Bingham McCutchen in September as a partner in the law firm’s Orange County, Calif., office as the firm seeks to build its presence in the region. Cox will be part of Bingham’s corporate, mergers and acquisitions, and securities practice and its affiliated Bingham Consulting Group, giving the Boston-founded firm the benefit of his deep roots in the southern California area.