Posts on ‘July 17th, 2009’

The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 provides government agencies with increased funding and more stringent legislation to combat financial and mortgage fraud. It also sends a message that Congress and the Obama administration want increased fraud enforcement in the financial arena. Businesses will be well served by understanding how the new areas of emphasis may apply to them, and by marshaling compliance and defense resources accordingly, say attorneys C. Shawn Cleveland and Emily Coleman McCall.

Extrasensory technologies collect and process information beyond the human senses. These technologies, such as license plate reading, which uses infrared cameras to capture digital images of plate numbers, raise privacy concerns similar to the warrantless use of GPS in Weaver.

Defendants being sued for negligence in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will not be able to depose six FBI agents on the government’s investigation into the attacks, Southern District of New York Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ruled Thursday. Airlines, airline security companies and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had hoped the depositions might show that the government’s failure to stop the terrorists was so egregious that the attacks would have happened regardless of any negligence on their part.

Bank of America might have a hill to climb in its dispute with Heller Ehrman’s creditors after a bankruptcy judge said Thursday he “can’t make any sense” of the bank’s legal defense theories. Heller’s creditors are claiming the bank should return about $58 million paid to it in the 90 days before the firm’s Dec. 28 bankruptcy filing, arguing it was not secured. The bank intends to try to go past Heller’s main partnership to the partner corporations that composed it, and assert they were liable for debts to the banks.

Senate Judiciary Committee questioning of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor ended on a friendly note Thursday, with Republicans joining Democrats in praising her demeanor and thoughtfulness, even as GOP senators expressed frustration that she had not fully answered their concerns. Whether the cordial ending of three days of grilling will translate into more than a handful of Republican votes for Sotomayor is unclear. But confirmation seems assured, and a committee vote is likely to come before the end of July.

Slaughter and May has emerged as the U.K. firm with the most satisfied associates when it comes to salaries and bonuses, according to Legal Week research. Slaughter associates have put the firm at the top of a table grading firms on their combined remuneration packages. The rankings form part of Legal Week Intelligence’s 2009 Employee Satisfaction Survey, which gauged the perceptions of more than 4,000 associates at the top 75 law firms in England and Wales and the top 10 U.S. firms in London.

Long before the recession killed the job market, Casey Berman realized the law wasn’t for him. Having already launched a number of companies — and sold one — he’s now starting a consultancy called Leave Law Behind through which he’ll hold the hands of disillusioned lawyers who want to start their own businesses. On Tuesday night, the 1999 Hastings College of the Law graduate pitched an alternative path for J.D.s at his alma mater in San Francisco: “Doing something you love.”

Foreign plaintiffs pursue entrance through the golden doors of American courtrooms because U.S. civil litigation offers potentially lucrative benefits that their homeland’s judicial system does not. Too often foreign plaintiffs seek access to American courts on tenuous legal and factual grounds, write Bowman and Brooke’s Paul G. Cereghini and John D. Sear. When public and private interests favor dismissal, the doctrine of forum non conveniens can help to reinforce the floodgates.

NCO Financial Systems has filed a federal suit against Trauner Cohen, which it hired to file collection actions for such clients as Capital One and American Express. NCO claims it gave the firm more than $1.3 million as reimbursement for fees related to more than 15,000 collection lawsuits, but that the firm instead used the money to cover its own expenses. The lawsuit, which alleges fraud, breach of contract and other claims, says the collection actions were intended to collect more than $100 million in outstanding debts.