Posts on ‘July 21st, 2009’

A Venezuelan investor who put $2.7 million in family savings into certificates of deposit sold by indicted Texas financier R. Allen Stanford has filed a proposed class action suit in Miami federal court, claiming Stanford’s insurance broker vouched for his bank’s investments. Advertising executive Reinaldo Ranni filed suit Friday against Britain’s Willis Group Holdings and its Colorado subsidiary on behalf of a class of Stanford International Bank’s Latin American investors.

California administrative law judges who rule on denial of unemployment benefits are having their own employment woes these days. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently ordered them, and other state workers under his control, to take a third unpaid furlough day every month as a cost-saving measure. The unpaid days will cost judges about 15 percent of their paychecks — and employment lawyers say the reduced workdays will only add to the case backlog.

The six associate judges of New York’s highest court, expected to recuse themselves in cases where the outcome affects them personally, now face the prospect of invoking a “rule of necessity” to consider whether they and the state’s other judges must be given a raise. The Court of Appeals has determined there is an appeal as of right in two judicial pay cases. But if the court is disqualified from hearing the issues involved, there apparently would be no other forum to resolve them, leaving the litigants in limbo.

The exit of a major player from the consumer arbitration industry is threatening to shake up the debate in Congress over whether to ban mandatory arbitration provisions in consumer contracts. The National Arbitration Forum announced Sunday that it would stop doing business in consumer arbitration by the end of this week, as part of a settlement with the attorney general of Minnesota. A leading lobby group for trial lawyers jumped on the settlement Monday as evidence of malpractice in the arbitration industry.

A Dallas jury returned a $178.7 million verdict against NL Industries, subsidiary NL Environmental Services and NL CEO Harold Simmons in a contracts case on Friday. The award included $33.7 million in actual damages, $140 million in punitive damages against NL Industries and $5 million in punitive damages against NL’s general counsel. The plaintiffs — minority shareholders in the NL subsidiary — claimed that NL had improperly stripped the subsidiary of its assets and reduced the value of their shares tenfold.

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor told the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday that she has “no personal views about the death penalty that would interfere with my obligation to apply the law as a judge.” In written responses to questions following up on a range of issues raised at her confirmation hearing last week, Sotomayor also discussed the use of foreign law in Supreme Court decision-making and explained her decision to resign from the all-female Belizean Grove shortly before her confirmation hearing.

When Morgan Lewis & Bockius cut its 2010 summer program so as to avoid a deferral-related bottleneck of incoming associates in 2011, the question became: Which law firm would be the next to cut its program? The answer: Ballard Spahr. In a message obtained by the legal blog Above the Law, the University of Pennsylvania Law School has informed its students that Ballard Spahr has pulled out of on-campus interviewing this year because it won’t have a 2010 summer associate program.

The former chief financial officer of Broadcom Corp. has urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to sustain a lower court that blasted Los Angeles-based Irell & Manella for “ethical misconduct” in a criminal backdating case. Lawyers for William Ruehle, the former executive, said in a brief filed last week that their client believed that conversations he had with Irell & Manella attorneys were protected by the attorney-client privilege.

A year after Heller Ehrman’s dissolution, many of its lawyers are still looking for homes, and in some cases, rekindling old friendships. When a seven-lawyer IP team moved from Proskauer Rose to Perkins Coie last week, four of those lawyers were reuniting with their former Heller brethren. The four partners started out together at Foley & Lardner’s Washington, D.C. office, then joined Heller in 2000, and left to come to Proskauer in 2006.

As expected, the Senate Judiciary Committee has delayed a vote scheduled for Tuesday on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Republicans exercised their right under committee rules for a one-week delay in the vote, a common tactic that senators in the minority party have used for controversial nominees and for legislation. The delay sets up a vote in the committee July 28, when Sotomayor is all but certain to win the committee’s endorsement.