Posts on ‘September 16th, 2009’

Two recent court rulings have employers on edge about employees with serious weight problems because one little accident may force them to pay thousands to get the weight off. That’s what’s happened to an Indiana pizza shop, which was ordered to pay for a 340-pound employee’s weight-loss surgery to ensure the success of a separate operation for a work-related back injury. The ruling mirrors a similar case in Oregon. The rulings are a sign of things to come, warn management-side lawyers.

R. Allen Stanford has new lawyers, but they are not from Patton Boggs, which announced in late July it was replacing criminal defense attorney Dick DeGuerin as the Houston financier’s criminal defense firm. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge David Hittner of the Southern District of Texas appointed the federal public defender’s office to represent Stanford after determining that Stanford does not have money immediately available to pay for private attorneys.

A more comprehensive approach to security management in the law firm is to layer a data loss prevention systems strategy on top of electronic redaction, metadata management and encryption. DLP systems help detect and prevent the misuse and unauthorized transmission of confidential data.

One year ago, banking behemoth Lehman Brothers Holdings crumbled, its Chapter 11 filing sending shockwaves across the world economy. A select few lawyers were at Ground Zero of the implosion. Among them was Lori Fife, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Lehman’s bankruptcy counsel. Along with Weil bankruptcy legend Harvey Miller, Fife has been on the case for the past year. The Am Law Daily spoke with Fife about the events surrounding Lehman’s fall and about what could have been done to stop it.

Lockheed Martin, which last spring won a $37 million trade secrets verdict against a competitor, has asked a federal judge for more than $16 million as reimbursement for fees and expenses it paid to Kilpatrick Stockton and Venable to pursue the case. Lockheed rival L-3 Communications Integrated Systems calls the fee request excessive, claiming that Kilpatrick Stockton rotated associates in and out of the case, causing lawyers to log “unreasonable hours to recreate knowledge obtained by other associates.”

At a Tuesday hearing on Pfizer’s $2.3 billion plea agreement with the Justice Department over charges the company illegally promoted off-label drug uses, a Boston federal judge said he’ll probably accept the company’s compliance agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services in lieu of probation. Judge Douglas Woodlock grilled attorneys on both sides about the agreement signed with the HHS. Ultimately, Woodlock said he probably would not order probation “because there’s an alternative mechanism.”

A few Silicon Valley lawyers are trying to prove that small is the new big in IP litigation. Two former Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges senior associates, Douglas Colt and Thomas Wallerstein, launched their own firm, Colt Wallerstein, last week. And the two-woman operation Turner Boyd just made its first hire, bringing on former Fish & Richardson IP lawyer Joshua Masur. “Everybody is realizing that big firms aren’t the only way to go,” said Karen Boyd of Turner Boyd, which is about a year old.

President Barack Obama has chosen Virginia Supreme Court Justice Barbara Keenan for one of five vacancies on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the White House said Monday. Keenan was the choice of Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Jim Webb and Mark Warner. She has been on Virginia’s highest court since 1991, after previously serving at every other level of the state’s judiciary. In 1980, Keenan became the first female judge to be elected in Virginia.