Posts on ‘October 16th, 2009’

Six lawyers were among 41 defendants charged in New York Thursday for allegedly using fraud to obtain over $64 million in mortgages on more than 100 properties. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced the multi-agency effort, dubbed “Operation Bad Deeds,” at a news conference Thursday, saying the 41 were charged in eight separate cases representing a “smorgasbord of scams.”

Under a bill signed into law by the governor of California this week, prosecutors hope witnesses in the state’s relocation program will be harder to find through Internet search engines. Malevolent posters, plus businesses that don’t act fast on take-down requests, could be punished.

Transcripts can be tagged with sticky flags and painstakingly summarized on a yellow legal pad, but why not use software to help you manage, annotate and integrate them with other files? According to consultant Brett Burney, TextMap 5 from LexisNexis is the right tool for the job.

A Texas federal judge on Wednesday issued an order securing four boxes of evidence in a criminal fraud case against Toyota, forbidding the company to touch them without proper supervision. A former Toyota in-house lawyer, who claims the automaker has destroyed or hidden evidence from hundreds of victims, provided the boxes to the judge in October in a RICO and products liability case filed by a Dallas attorney. Toyota — but not the plaintiffs attorneys — will have supervised access to the boxes.

This year’s disappointing litigation landscape makes the just-published 2009 Fulbright & Jaworski Litigation Trends survey all the more important. The report is a chronicle of the impact of the recession, but it’s also a guide to where recovery, at least for litigators, will begin. This is the sixth year that Fulbright asked independent researchers to survey senior corporate counsel to determine significant trends in litigation. Not surprisingly, one hot topic this year was alternative billing arrangements.

The First Amendment does not insulate animal rights activists from criminal liability when they use a Web site to orchestrate a campaign of harassment, cyberattacks, vandalism and destruction of property, the 3rd Circuit has ruled. The three-judge panel unanimously refused to strike down the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, rejecting arguments by six activists, convicted for targeting an animal testing firm, who complained that the law had effectively criminalized their legitimate political protests.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that defendants can never be
awarded counsel fees under the offer-of-judgment rule in any case in
which plaintiffs benefit from a statutory fee-shifting provision. But
the decision gives defendants an incentive to make an offer in such
cases anyway, as long as it is clear how much would be for the plaintiff
and how much for the plaintiff’s legal fees. The opinion is an attempt
to reconcile the intent of fee-shifting laws and the offer-of-judgment
rule.