Posts on ‘July 29th, 2009’

These are tough times, and lawyers are receiving lots of advice on how to cope. It may all make sense and even sound easy, yet many careers are still floundering. Business development may be the sticking point, says consultant Nadine Slavitt, due to something lawyers don’t like to talk about — lack of self-confidence. Slavitt says two of the usual reasons why lawyers may feel insecure about networking include a negative internal dialogue and a lack of experience, which are both manageable issues.

So much for a Hollywood ending. The economic recession has hit the most escapist of industries as deals for actors, musicians, directors and other talent in the entertainment sector have plummeted, according to attorneys who structure transactions. The downturn in deals — affecting both their number and value — could hit the proliferation of entertainment law boutiques especially hard because the lawyers at those firms feed off a single revenue stream: They get a percentage of the deals they draft.

Bernard Madoff once had the best that money could buy when it came to his many homes. For his latest accommodations, he sought out a different kind of broker: a type of prison consultant increasingly popular among white-collar wrongdoers. From Martha Stewart to Michael Vick, prison consultants are often hired by celebrities, white-collar miscreants and disgraced politicians to lobby for good prison placement, mitigate sentence length and offer crash courses in prison culture.

A federal judge has thrown out a wrongful-termination lawsuit by a former D.C. judge who was fired after filing a $54 million lawsuit over a pair of pants. Roy Pearson claimed that the District used the fact that he was being vilified in the media to cut him out of his $100,000-a-year job as an administrative judge. The District’s judicial commission did not cite the pants lawsuit as the reason for firing Pearson. But the presiding federal judge suggested there was a “strong basis” to do so.

Debevoise & Plimpton said Tuesday that it had hired two banking partners from Goodwin Procter. Gregory Lyons, the former co-chair of Goodwin’s financial services group, will join Debevoise as a partner in New York, serving as co-chair for the Americas of the financial institutions group. Satish Kini, a Washington, D.C., partner, will co-chair Debevoise’s banking practice.

A lawsuit brought nearly two years ago by former Guess CEO Georges Marciano has backfired, leaving Marciano on the receiving end of a $370 million jury verdict, according to opposing counsel. The millionaire magnate who steered the rise of Guess jeans had sued five former employees of his real estate company for embezzlement and fraud, but when those employees filed cross-complaints alleging libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress a year ago, the French designer’s case went downhill.

Hal Turner, the Web talk show host indicted for encouraging the killing of three federal judges, pleaded not guilty Tuesday. His lawyer told the magistrate judge that Turner was a former FBI informant who had helped authorities thwart an assassination attempt on Barack Obama. The lawyer also suggested a possible First Amendment defense when he told the judge that Turner was only expressing opinions, albeit “outlandish” ones, when he posted Web messages saying the judges “deserve to be killed.”

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges has managed to squeeze out another settlement for Parmalat, the new-and-improved version of the Italian dairy company that collapsed under the weight of internal fraud in 2003. On Tuesday, Bank of America announced that it had reached a $100 million global settlement with Parmalat in a deal that includes a cash and non-cash component. The BofA settlement follows a $150 million deal between Parmalat and one of its former auditors, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.