Posts on ‘October 13th, 2009’

The current oversupply of new associates has sent law firms scrambling to implement short-term adjustments, such as secondments and deferrals. But the legal profession needs more than temporary half-measures, writes Harvard Law School’s Ashish Nanda. The new-associate recruitment market is fundamentally broken, he says, and it has been for some time. The market needs a structural fix — a centralized matching authority, like the one that the medical profession has been using for more than half a century.

Prosecutors’ repeated “gratuitous” references, “with a lot of arch emphasis and many facetious asides” to the nickname of a defendant — “Murder” — entitled the defendant to a new trial for attempted murder, the 2nd Circuit has ruled. The court concluded prosecutors “invited prejudice by repeatedly emphasizing [Laval] Farmer’s nickname in a manner designed to suggest that he was known by his associates as a murderer and that he acted in accordance with that propensity in carrying out the acts charged in the indictment.”

Taxpayers can rejoice that alleged Ponzi schemer R. Allen Stanford is no longer a public ward — at least, not when it comes to his legal defense. On Friday, a Texas federal judge ruled that Stanford can now use insurance proceeds from a Lloyds of London directors and officers policy to pay his legal bills. With his assets frozen, Stanford’s criminal case had been turned over in mid-September to a public defender and a Houston defense lawyer, who has been billing the government at the court-set rate of $110 an hour.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has stayed the malpractice lawsuit filed against Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney by the two name partners of Virginia-based lobbying firm Alcalde & Fay. Lawyers for Buchanan Ingersoll and for Hector Alcalde and Kevin Fay filed a joint motion to stay the suit, saying it was in the interest of “judicial economy” to await the findings of an Internal Revenue Service administrative proceeding that could render the malpractice suit moot.

It isn’t a good sign when an appeals court refers to a lower court’s
“ruling” in quotation marks as if it’s not worthy of the term. But
that’s exactly what a California appeals court did — three times — in
reversing a “ruling” by a trial judge in an overpapered case featuring
5,415 pages of briefs. The case, which involves “what may well be the
most oppressive motion ever presented to a superior court,” could be
considered “the poster child” for criticism of the summary judgment
process, Justice James Richman wrote.

Investors who sued Proskauer Rose in August accusing one of its partners of involvement in Stanford Financial Group’s alleged Ponzi scheme have added Chadbourne & Parke as a defendant. The class action alleges that attorney Thomas V. Sjoblom, while he worked at Chadbourne and later at Proskauer Rose, participated in a $7 billion investment fraud orchestrated by the Texas company. The National Law Journal has learned that Sjoblom has withdrawn from Proskauer since the class action was filed.

It’s the libel case that set free-speech advocates reeling: Noonan v. Staples Inc. In February a federal appeals court held that truth is not always an absolute defense to claims of libel — and kicked the case back to a jury. Now the people have spoken. Late last week, a Massachusetts jury found that a mass e-mail sent out by Staples about an employee who was fired for violating the company’s travel and expense policy was not sent with actual malice.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz shed some light on the announcement Monday that Apple board of directors member Arthur Levinson had resigned without explanation as a member of Google’s board. In a statement released Tuesday, Leibowitz suggested that the move came to head off an FTC court action. The FTC began an inquiry this May into whether the close ties between the two technology companies, which then shared two board members, might violate antitrust laws.

A federal judge called a patent holding company’s lawsuit against Foley & Lardner “groundless” and “beyond the pale” before dismissing it Friday. Judge Leonie Brinkema granted a voluntary dismissal requested by the plaintiff, SPH America, but not before giving the company’s lawyer a stern lecture. “If Rule 11 were a little bit different, I would consider imposing sanctions on the plaintiff for having filed this suit,” she said, referring to the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure on frivolous lawsuits.

In a big win for gay rights groups, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation Sunday declaring that same-sex marriages performed outside of California prior to the passage of Proposition 8 are legally valid in the Golden State. The new law also clarifies that same-sex couples who married in another state after Nov. 5, 2008, must be given the same rights and benefits as opposite-sex spouses, although their unions will not be called marriages.