Posts on ‘September 2nd, 2009’

Pfizer, the world’s largest drug maker, will pay a record $2.3 billion civil and criminal penalty over unlawful prescription drug promotions, the DOJ announced Wednesday. The department said the $2.3 billion settlement included a $1.2 billion criminal fine, the largest criminal fine in U.S. history. The DOJ said the company promoted four prescription drugs, including the pain killer Bextra, as treatments for medical conditions different than those the drugs had been approved for by federal regulators.

In a ruling Tuesday, a San Francisco Superior Court judge overturned unpaid furlough days that were ordered for more than 6,000 employees of the State Compensation Insurance Fund. The ruling follows similar decisions in Maryland and Hawaii, where courts also recently blocked furloughs of public employees. In the California case, the Service Employees International Union Local 1000 had argued that insurance fund employees were exempt from furloughs under the California Insurance Code.

There’s an irony to law firm IT: Firms spend so much time on issues like infrastructure that they spend too little time using technology to improve how lawyers work. To achieve real value from technology investments, says consultant David B. Cunningham, law firms need a new model.

A mammoth environmental mass torts case filed against Chevron by 30,000 indigenous plaintiffs in Ecuador took a dramatic turn Monday when Chevron announced it had obtained videotapes showing evidence of bribery on the part of Judge Juan Nunez, who has overseen legal proceedings in the Ecuadorean town of Lago Agrio since August 2008. Charles James — former GC and current executive vice president of Chevron — discusses the case, the videotapes and where he sees this decade-long battle going.

Lawsuits brought by unhappy former employees are never welcome. But when a former in-house lawyer accuses a company’s current and past general counsel of willfully ignoring him when he told them that the company was concealing and destroying evidence it was required to turn over to plaintiffs in lawsuits — well, it doesn’t get much uglier than that. The suit brought by Dimitrios Biller against Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. accuses Toyota of obstructing justice and violating civil racketeering laws.

In a case involving a trademark well known to audiophiles, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled on Monday that the trademark office’s appeal board had incorrectly lowered the fraud standard for trademark applicants. The Federal Circuit ruling said that the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had “erroneously lowered the fraud standard to a simple negligence standard” when it canceled the “Wave” trademark registration of audio products maker Bose Corp.