Posts on ‘September 9th, 2009’

With President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden watching, new
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor formally took her seat on the
Court on Tuesday afternoon as Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wished her
a “long and happy career in our common calling.” A beaming Sotomayor was
joined in the courtroom by family, friends and a star-studded list of
legal heavyweights, including her predecessor, David Souter.

Robert Bennett’s decision to leave Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom after two decades of generating headlines sounds like bad news for one of Washington’s highest-grossing law offices. But lawyers are split over whether the loss will have much of an impact. Bennett, whose list of past clients reads like a history of political scandal, is planning to move to Hogan & Hartson after a partnership vote this week, the Washington-based firm announced on Sept. 3.

Gregory Garre, who was deputy solicitor general and then briefly solicitor general at the end of the Bush administration, has begun work as chair of Latham & Watkins’ Supreme Court and appellate practice group in the firm’s Washington, D.C., office. He will take over that role from Maureen Mahoney, who has headed the 70-lawyer appellate practice for two decades. Garre called joining Latham & Watkins a “remarkable” opportunity.

A 9th Circuit panel on Friday denounced the federal government’s post-9/11 practice of detaining innocent Americans under the federal material witness statute as “repugnant” and “a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history.” In allowing Abdullah al-Kidd’s lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft to proceed, the panel held that al-Kidd’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when he was arrested and imprisoned without charges.

New York AG Andrew Cuomo has asked Bank of America to allow his office to question the institution’s lawyers in a probe of its merger with Merrill Lynch. The request comes at a time of scrutiny into the involvement of the bank’s lawyers in Merrill Lynch’s decision to issue $3.6 billion in bonus payments on the eve of the merger. In a letter, Cuomo’s office said it cannot adequately explore whether to bring charges against BofA officers because of the bank’s “indiscriminate invocation of the attorney-client privilege.”

A new rule proposed by San Francisco Superior Court would remind potential jurors not to blog, Tweet or conduct Internet research about cases. The need for the rule became clear to the court during a jury selection in a criminal trial, when an entire panel of 600 jurors had to be excused.

After 23 years in a midsize firm, Steven A. Reisler decided to go solo and run his practice with free and open source software. For a penguin-sized law firm, hanging out a shingle with Linux proved to be a smart, relatively painless, efficient and cost-effective way to practice law.