Posts on ‘October 19th, 2009’

Faced with the prospect of harsh discipline from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, well-known plaintiffs lawyer Walter Lack attempted the following play on Thursday: Convince three judges that his misconduct wasn’t intentional, even though he signed a document admitting it was. Rather than helping his cause, the panel appeared to think Lack was dodging responsibility. Lack may have actually aggravated his situation by appearing in person, said one judge.

Richard Susskind, the author of “The End of Lawyers?,” says that in the future, corporate attorneys who embrace emerging technologies and novel ways of sourcing legal work will continue to be successful, while those unwilling to change will struggle to survive. Susskind predicts that there will be five types of lawyers in the future: expert trusted advisers and enhanced practitioners, who will look much like contemporary lawyers, to be joined by legal knowledge engineers, legal risk managers and legal hybrids.

For the first time, law firms are going to be rated on something that is crucial to the companies that hire them: customer satisfaction. On Tuesday, the Association of Corporate Counsel will launch what it calls the ACC Value Index. A press release says the browsable index “will allow members of ACC to share ratings of law firms based on client satisfaction so that they can better meet company demands.” Perhaps most importantly, participants will be asked: “Would you hire this firm again?”

Backers of a new California law that bars mortgage modification services from charging up-front fees say the rules will put scam artists out of business. But real estate attorneys say the new rules have created a host of unanswered questions and wonder whether the regulations will really just drive honest attorneys out of the practice. Said one: “I think you’re going to see a lot of lawyers not doing this anymore. It’s just not worth it.”

Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., have accused former Nixon Peabody associate Melissa Mahler, who was hit with civil insider trading charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, of making false statements to SEC investigators. Mahler allegedly denied that she placed an order for shares of a client’s stock and said she only found out about the trade when she received her account statement from her broker. The charges say that Mahler knew about the trade, having allegedly made it herself.

The 5th Circuit recently heard arguments in a case that could affect every lawyer who leaves a law firm for other legal employment. The key question: Is there a rebuttable or irrebuttable presumption that an attorney had the confidences of all of the firm’s clients when he left the firm? Legal ethics experts say the case’s outcome is important to lawyers who work in firms with hundreds of clients, and is especially significant in an economic environment in which many attorneys are making lateral moves.

Arguing that you broke the law to comply with it is apparently not the way to win an argument before the 11th Circuit. In a tart opinion, the court said a debt collector could not defend itself by saying it acted in good faith when it intentionally violated one requirement of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act so that it wouldn’t run afoul of another provision. The court compared the debt collector’s logic to the “oft-repeated statement from the Vietnam War,” that “we had to destroy the village to save it.”

Starting next month in New York, bankrupt law firm Heller Ehrman will sell off hundreds of artworks to repay a small portion of its debt. The largely contemporary collection is expected to fetch between $610,000 and $1 million in a slow art market. Peter Benvenutti, the chair of Heller’s dissolution committee who is now at Jones Day in San Francisco, said he expected the auction to generate “a small fraction of the original cost” of the art, which he said was substantially more than $1 million.

A bankruptcy judge has ruled that O’Melveny & Myers will have to forgo $750,000 in fees for its role in the SonicBlue bankruptcy. Judge Marilyn Morgan of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose ruled from the bench late Thursday after a two-day evidentiary hearing into O’Melveny partner Suzzanne Uhland’s role in a controversial settlement between the estate, VIA Technologies Inc. and Intel Corp. involving a patent cross-licensing agreement.

One of America’s wealthiest men, Raj Rajaratnam, a portfolio manager for Galleon Group, was among six hedge fund managers and corporate executives arrested Friday in a hedge fund insider trading case that authorities say generated more than $25 million in illegal profits and was a wake-up call for Wall Street. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said it was the largest hedge fund case ever prosecuted and marked the first use of court-authorized wiretaps to capture conversations by suspects in an insider trading case.