Posts from ‘September, 2009’

Cooley Godward Kronish associate Eric Koester attended an entrepreneurial boot camp set up by Startup Weekend to provide support to new companies, but ended up pitching his own idea for an Apple iPhone application that connects faces to names through LinkedIn accounts. Within 24 hours, a team of 14 people had created a working prototype for Learn That Name. It’s now available to iPhone users for $1, and Koester says he’s thinking about developing another version for Facebook.

In a tanking economy, lawyers and their clients are increasingly finding themselves on opposing sides instead of sharing the same table in court, as a growing number of firms sue clients over unpaid attorney fees and clients fight back with legal malpractice counterclaims. Attorney Warren Trazenfeld says lawyers suing clients is “one of the top 10 stupidest things a lawyer can do.” And Carlton Fields’ Charles Rosenberg says lawsuits are sometimes necessary, but overall, suing clients is a lose-lose scenario.

The estate of author James Joyce has agreed to pay $240,000 in legal costs incurred by a Stanford University scholar following a fair use legal battle over a book about Joyce’s daughter. The settlement ends more than a decade of wrangling and brings to a close one of the more prominent academic fair use cases in recent years, which garnered interest partly due to the Joyce estate’s aggressive approach to protecting copyrighted material.

A Stanford University law school graduate will have to serve a year of home detention for failing to pay taxes on money she earned while working as a prostitute. Cristina Warthen, who worked as an escort in New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., will also have to pay the government about $243,000 as part of a plea deal.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dealt what is likely to be the final blow to Delaware’s plan for a state-sponsored gambling lottery that would have allowed residents to make bets on individual games in several sports. On Tuesday the full court denied the state’s request to rehear a panel decision reached last month that struck down the plan as a violation of a 1992 law that bans sports gambling with limited exceptions.

In determining Debevoise & Plimpton should not be removed as counsel in a case where several of its lawyers may be called as witnesses, an appellate court has issued a “new formulation” of the rule requiring attorneys’ disqualification for a conflict of interest. The 2nd Circuit ruled that a firm “can be disqualified by imputation only if the movant proves by clear and convincing evidence” that the witness will give testimony prejudicial to the client and that the “integrity of the judicial system” will suffer as a result.

A New Jersey appeals court ruled Tuesday that a victim of Reed Slatkin’s Ponzi-type scheme cannot pursue a malpractice claim against his law firm, which allegedly helped him conceal the fraud during an SEC probe. The court said the judge who dismissed the suit used a novel but allowable analysis in applying the doctrine of forum non conveniens, based in part on his view that a New Jersey fact-finder should not decide whether Bryan Cave conformed to ethics rules in California, where it represented Slatkin.

Insurers and individuals who suffered losses in New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle’s fatal plane crash in Manhattan in 2006 have agreed to accept $2 million and drop the pursuit of almost $60 million in property and personal injury claims against the estates of Lidle and his flight instructor, a mediator in the case said Tuesday. The claimants accepted the $2 million because Lidle, 34, and the instructor who died with him, Tyler Stanger, 26, each had a $1 million liability policy.

Former Paul Hastings tax associate Eric A. Holzer on Tuesday was spared a prison term for trading on inside information on two corporate transactions in 2005. The guidelines called for a sentencing range of between 12 and 18 months in prison, but Southern District of New York Judge Victor A. Marrero said he agreed with the probation department’s assessment that this was “a good person who made a terrible mistake” and ordered Holzer to spend nine months in a halfway house, on weekends if he chooses.

An Ecuadorean court dealt plaintiffs a setback Tuesday in a $27 billion environmental contamination lawsuit against Chevron, accepting the presiding judge’s request to be removed from the case so the government can investigate Chevron’s claims that he was involved in a bribery scheme. A verdict in the case had been expected this year, but the lead attorney for the plaintiffs said it will take a new judge “four to five months to get to know a case that has some 17,000 documents.”