Posts on ‘August 17th, 2009’

Florida Judge Scott Silverman has dismissed a fraud suit punctuated by a trial during which a witness got text messages while on the stand. Silverman ordered a mistrial in May after learning of the messages sent between Sky Development’s CEO and CFO while the judge was in a sidebar conference, and last week the judge dismissed Sky’s suit over the sale of a condo tower. “Nothing this judge has seen holds a candle to plaintiff’s egregious and deliberate attempts to subvert our justice system,” he wrote in his dismissal order.

Regulators on Friday shut down Colonial BancGroup, a big lender in real estate development that buckled under the collapse of the market. It was the biggest U.S. bank to fail this year, with about $25 billion in assets. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the appointed receiver of Montgomery, Ala.-based Colonial, approved the sale of the bank’s $20 billion in deposits and about $22 billion of its assets to BB&T Corp. The failure of Colonial is expected to cost the deposit insurance fund an estimated $2.8 billion.

D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Vanessa Ruiz, who has been aggressively
pushed by a number of well-connected Democratic lawyers for promotion to
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, is being taken to task
for having an excessive backlog of undecided cases. Despite giving Ruiz
a “well qualified” rating, a judicial review commission pulled few
punches in an evaluation it sent to President Barack Obama. The question
now is whether the commission’s report will torpedo her chances for the
federal bench.

Heller’s creditors want $13.8 million of the law firm’s pension plan assets “set aside” for them, and Heller’s dissolution committee has agreed to do so. Creditors think about $24 million in pension contributions for 2007 fall under a fraudulent transfer claim they say they’ll assert against former shareholders. About $10.2 million was in other pension plans that have been liquidated and closed, leaving about $13.8 million for creditors to haggle over.

Automakers Chrysler and General Motors changed the history of dealer relations when they stepped through dozens of state laws and regulations and terminated thousands of long-standing dealers through the power of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Now that they have emerged from bankruptcy, history remains to be written on the intriguing issues of whether GM will be able to make its new, bold agreement, heavily weighted in GM’s favor, stick in the face of state dealer laws.

EDD Special Master Craig Ball was once trial counsel for a Mexican city’s water authority employing a patchwork system riddled with leaks, an apt metaphor for e-discovery for Ball. A costly leak is blind reliance on text extraction and indexing engines as principal tools of ESI search.

The Obama administration’s “pay czar” is embarking on a review of proposed compensation packages for the top employees at seven companies that are on government life support, marking the first time a federal official will have veto power over how much private-sector executives are compensated. Kenneth Feinberg, who ran the government’s fund for families of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has 60 days to approve or reject the compensation plans submitted by bailout recipients.