Posts on ‘July 24th, 2009’

While working at one of the biggest financial institutions in the world, Kimberly Summe was thinking small. Last year, as a lawyer at Lehman Brothers, Summe developed an idea for a pro bono program that would assist microfinance projects around the globe that provide small loans to entrepreneurs in developing nations. Even as Lehman collapsed last fall, Summe managed to launch Paladin Connect, which now provides free legal help to more than a dozen microfinance groups from Bangladesh to Bosnia.

International regulation of data security grows ever more complex, with penalties for noncompliance varying from civil fines to jail time. With ever-changing rules on security and control of data, it may seem impossible to keep up, but that’s not true — it just takes a lot of work.

When the American Bar Association meets in Chicago next week, its House of Delegates will consider resolutions on a wide range of topics, from attorney misconduct to intellectual property litigation to pro bono conflicts of interest. The proposals will be considered during the last two days of the annual meeting, which runs from July 30 to Aug. 4.

A man who hacked into a computer network to gain advance information about a company’s financial reports can be sued for fraud under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 even though he owed no fiduciary duty to the company, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled. The circuit said there is nothing in the case law that “expressly imposes a fiduciary-duty requirement on the ordinary meaning of ‘deceptive’ where the alleged fraud is an affirmative misrepresentation rather than a nondisclosure.”

Congress is preparing to wade into the growing debate over the pleading standard for civil lawsuits, after two recent Supreme Court decisions effectively upended longstanding precedent. Sen. Arlen Specter filed legislation Wednesday designed to return the rule to what it was prior to the two rulings, which raised the standard that pleaders must meet to avoid having their cases quickly tossed. If considered, the bill would likely be a lightning rod for debate among plaintiffs lawyers, consumer groups and businesses.

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.”