Posts on ‘August 27th, 2009’

New York federal district court Judge Jed Rakoff has granted preliminary approval to the settlement of a securities class action Bank of America inherited when it acquired Merrill Lynch. The bank has agreed to pay $150 million to former Merrill Lynch investors who accused the company of misleading them in connection with the sale of bonds and preferred stock. He also awarded co-lead counsel Keller Rohrback and Cohen Milstein & Toll a handsome $18.75 million in attorney fees.

The New Hampshire Historical Society has announced that retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter is donating his personal and professional papers to the society. But Souter has placed an extraordinarily long restriction on public access to his papers, barring anyone — researchers, historians, friends, journalists — from viewing the material for 50 years. That’s a lengthier seal than any justice has placed on papers in recent memory.

A federal appeals court has upheld denial of the benefit of a plea bargain to a lawyer-defendant who kept downplaying his responsibility for the crime. Jonathan Saint Preux, a former New Jersey solo, was sentenced to 57 months for submitting false immigration documents, 11 more months than the most he would have received under the plea deal. Saint Preux elected to plead guilty in return for the reduced sentence but “in doing so, he attempted to plead guilty without admitting guilt,” the 3rd Circuit wrote.

In a brief filed with the Federal Circuit seeking to overturn a $290 million patent infringement judgment entered against Microsoft, the company’s lawyers take aim at Texas federal Judge Leonard Davis, providing a long list of his alleged failures and missteps at trial. They also address Davis’ finding that Microsoft’s lead counsel made “improper arguments” when he compared Canadian company i4i to a bank seeking a bailout. Partly because of those arguments, Davis enhanced the jury’s award to i4i by $40 million.

The Am Law world got to flex its muscles Wednesday when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation backed off of stringent proposed rules that would have governed private equity investment in failed banks. Am Law’s biggest names had submitted letter after letter urging the FDIC to back off the regulations and arguing that the proposed rules discriminated against private equity firms by setting higher standards for them than for other types of investors.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a pair of statements on the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. — one from Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., and the other from Justice Stephen Breyer, who worked for Kennedy 30 years ago as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. And a handwritten note found in the recently released papers of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist serves as an example of Kennedy’s talent for making alliances and extending courtesies across the aisle and with adversaries.

New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli improperly revoked the $106,000 annual pension of a Long Island lawyer, a judge has ruled in ordering the state to restore the benefit. The state had sought the repayment of $605,874 in pension payments made to D’Agostino between August 2002 and March 2008 — one of the largest amounts sought in a wide-ranging probe of payments to lawyers who were improperly enrolled in the state pension system as employees of government agencies they represented.

The family of one of the youngest prisoners ever held at Guantanamo plans to sue the U.S. government to compensate him for mistreatment and an adolescence lost to nearly seven years in a cell, his lawyers said Thursday. Mohammed Jawad returned to Afghanistan this week after a military judge ruled that he was coerced into confessing that he threw a grenade at an unmarked vehicle in the capital in 2002. The attack wounded two American soldiers and their interpreter.

The D.C. Court of Appeals handed down a 60-day suspension Thursday for a former Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman associate who told clients that he was senior counsel. A hearing committee of the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility had recommended that Garland Stillwell receive a suspension as opposed to a sterner punishment because he admitted his wrongdoing and made attempts to address it. Stillwell reimbursed the firm for its losses and received professional counseling.

Law firms looking to cash in on new work sparked by a recently enacted Illinois state law expanding the availability of video poker and other games may be waiting a while. The law, passed last month, would allow thousands of new video poker and other games to be set up in the state’s bars and restaurants. But at a public meeting of the Illinois Gaming Board on Tuesday, Chairman Aaron Jaffe said he lacks the staff attorneys and other resources to meet the Sept. 1 deadline for the new licensing rules.