Posts on ‘October 9th, 2009’

In July, following a six-week trial, a jury in New York found American entrepreneur Frederic Bourke Jr. guilty of knowing about bribes that helped grease the wheels in the privatization of an Azerbaijan state oil company. But thanks to a bizarre series of legal events, Viktor Kozeny — the alleged mastermind behind the bribery scheme — is living in the Bahamas, while Bourke, an investor who merely knew of the bribes, is preparing for a possible prison term.

Nearly a year after Lynne Zagami was laid off from Brown Rudnick, she’s back to work. After the third-year corporate associate was let go last November, she spent 11 months scrambling to find a new job. On Monday, Zagami began her new job as the director of client strategic processes at Brightleaf Corp., a startup company developing software to streamline document production in law firms and in-house legal departments. Zagami spoke about her new job and whether she’d ever go back to a law firm.

Robert Milavetz, the founder of an 11-lawyer bankruptcy firm, wasn’t pleased about a 2005 law that seemed to forbid lawyers from advising bankruptcy clients to incur any more debt and that required bankruptcy lawyers to use specific language in advertisements. Milavetz sued, and the 8th Circuit issued a split decision. Milavetz got Dechert’s D. Eric Brunstad to handle a petition for certiorari, and the Justice Department filed one too. The Supreme Court granted both petitions, and now arguments are set for December.

San Francisco criminal defense lawyer Eric Safire has been getting hate mail since directing eight men to stand up in court when a key prosecution witness was asked to identify the shooter in a murder case. “I just wanted him not to be the only black guy with gold teeth in the room,” Safire told The Recorder. Safire said it’s an age-old tactic: “All the great defense lawyers in the world used to do it.” Following Safire’s courtroom maneuver, the men were arrested on suspicion of gang-related witness intimidation.

A law firm that mass-produced collection letters and litigation documents violated the federal debt collection act in a matter it filed a decade ago, a New York federal judge has ruled. The judge found supporting evidence for the conclusion that collection letter and litigation documents were “regularly” produced in volume “by non-lawyers at the push of a button.” Upton, Cohen & Slamowitz — now known as Cohen & Slamowitz — had not decided as of Wednesday whether to appeal, an attorney for the firm said.

The SEC has released a draft of its strategic plan for the next five years, outlining a series of 70 initiatives focusing on ramped up enforcement and an emphasis on addressing “specific problems brought to light by the global financial crisis.” The plan sets the bar high, calling for the SEC to win its cases 90 percent of the time, while at the same time filing “large, difficult, or precedent-setting cases when appropriate, even if success is not assured.”

Dawn Smith made partner two years ago at Morrison & Foerster. Now she’ll be general counsel at one of Silicon Valley’s biggest new companies, VMWare, which made a splash in 2007 when EMC spun it off in a billion-dollar IPO. Smith was a corporate associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati before joining MoFo as counsel where she worked on M&A deals like Intel’s $884 million deal for Wind River. She replaces Rashmi Garde as legal chief at VMWare.

Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft steeply discounted its billing rates for work on behalf of the Treasury Department related to the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request spell out the specifics of the big cuts in hourly rates typically charged by Cadwalader partners and associates. The co-chair of Cadwalader’s financial restructuring group says he does not believe the firm intended to consent to the release of its rates.

New York’s highest court, which three years ago ruled that same-sex couples do not have a constitutional right to marry in the state, will get an opportunity to approach the issue from a different angle next week, when it ponders whether state and local governments can recognize same-sex marriages solemnized in jurisdictions where such unions are legal. Two cases challenging the recognition of same-sex marriages will be heard together as the Court of Appeals begins its next session on Tuesday.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced plans to drop controversial proposed patent rules that were challenged in Tafas v. Kappos, a case pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The PTO also said it plans to file a joint motion with one of the plaintiffs, GlaxoSmithKline, to dismiss and vacate the federal district court decision, which declared the rules invalid in April 2008.