Posts on ‘October 9th, 2009’

A large shareholder at Bank of America is urging its board of directors to allow ex-GC Tim Mayopoulos to testify about the bank’s merger with Merrill Lynch. The New York attorney general’s office, which has been investigating the bank’s failure to disclose certain facts about Merrill’s multibillion-dollar bonus pool and its mounting losses leading up to the merger, has questioned Mayopoulos, but he could not answer disclosure questions due to attorney-client privilege and a confidentiality agreement.

The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that if a criminal defendant wants a jury with fewer than 12 people and the judge allows it, a state prosecutor can’t stop it. In a unanimous opinion, the court rejected DuPage County State’s Attorney Joseph Birkett’s request for a writ of mandamus to force Judge Peter Dockery to deny a request for a six-person jury made by defendant William Krolik, who is charged with attempted home invasion and armed robbery.

A federal judge on Wednesday accused a class action lawyer of trying to delay a settlement that helped nearly 600 eating disorder patients so he could pursue a fight with a co-counsel over shares of a $2.45 million fee award. U.S. District Judge Faith Hochberg told New Jersey lawyer David Mazie that he put his own interests above “those of people who are dying” when he sought to make the division of fees an issue just before the preliminary settlement of a case against Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Businesses considering the implementation of new digital voicemail systems should evaluate their effect on the company’s e-discovery obligations to preserve, search for and disclose data relevant to litigation or investigation, say Gibbons lawyers Marc S. Sidoti and Paul E. Asfendis.

A federal appeals court has rejected challenges to the $567 million attorney fee award in the fen-phen diet-drug litigation, declaring that Judge Harvey Bartle III had handled the massive case properly at every step. “The amount of the award, though extraordinarily large, is not excessive in this extraordinary case,” 3rd Circuit Judge Kent Jordan wrote. Jordan found that Bartle “employed transparent procedures and undertook a thorough and proper analysis — based on the appropriate information — in determining the award.”

If Hogan & Hartson, the Washington giant, and Lovells, the most global of the leading U.K. firms, consummate their merger talks, the new entity will have a chance to remake a corner of the Big Law marketplace. It would be the first major trans-Atlantic merger of globally oriented equals; the first trans-Atlantic deal that would be built, in significant part, on the strength of its combined litigation practices; and the first deal of its sort that didn’t pretend to offer entree into the New York capital markets.

A new study projects a 4.3 percent slide in corporate spending on outside counsel next year, on top of this year’s 10.8 percent drop. Outside counsel spending dropped from an average of $20.8 million in 2008 to $18.5 million this year and is projected to dip to $17.7 million in 2010, according to a study by BTI Consulting Group. Practice areas expected to sharply contract include real estate, corporate, tax, environmental and IP transactional work.