Posts on ‘October 26th, 2009’

China has been transfixed by news of the country’s first big mafia trials. Protected by corrupt officials, gangs involved in gambling, loan-sharking, drugs and prostitution operated freely in the city of Chongqing, reaping billions in illegal profits. A government crackdown launched a few months ago has so far produced nearly 1,500 arrests. The first defendants went on trial a little over a week ago. Six gang members were sentenced to death Wednesday, with five more receiving life terms.

Before graduating law school, Jennifer Brooks had already lined up her first associate job — until the firm rescinded her job offer. About a year and a half later, Brooks is now a first-year associate at Conway & Stoughton. Associates have been cut by the hundreds since last year, and law school students who thought they had jobs this fall found that they wouldn’t start until next year or that they didn’t have a job at all. So new associates who are finding jobs aren’t taking things for granted.

A federal judge’s ruling in an ERISA case shows that retirement plan administrators are in a bad spot when confronted with beneficiaries whom they suspect of gaming the system to access retirement payments, several experts say. The case involves a group of Continental Airlines senior pilots who allegedly obtained “sham divorces” to receive early payment of benefits from their retirement plan. The judge ruled that nothing in ERISA allows a plan administrator to question or thwart such suspected actions by plan beneficiaries.

Judge Dennis Montali is already asking the two main lawyers on the Heller Ehrman bankruptcy to file a revised liquidation plan before the first hearing on it Nov. 9. In a letter to the lawyers, the judge pointed out dozens of issues, some of them technical and even grammatical, but many of them substantive. Montali mentioned the creditors’ $58 million suit against Bank of America several times, wanting to know how the plan would work if the bank wins.

Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the 5-month-old U.S. Supreme Court decision that has become a thorn in the side of the plaintiffs bar, will get a Capitol Hill airing on Tuesday. The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold the first congressional hearing on the far-reaching May ruling, which raised the pleading standard for most civil complaints, making it more difficult to keep cases from being thrown out.

Davis Wright Tremaine has agreed to a global settlement in litigation against the firm related to the collapse of Sunwest Management, an Oregon-based provider of senior living centers. The reported settlement amount: $30 million, one of the largest malpractice settlements by a law firm in the Pacific Northwest. Investors suing Davis Wright had claimed that they were misled by the firm’s legal advice on real estate transactions involving Sunwest properties.

New York-based firms scored some high-profile work as part of the U.S. government’s response to the economic meltdown. While that hasn’t touched off a hiring boom in their Washington, D.C., offices, the Legal Times 150 survey shows that head count for the New York firms declined just 2.8 percent between April 2008 and April 2009. And with the Obama administration beefing up regulatory enforcement, many D.C.-based managing partners say they expect their offices to take center stage during the coming year.

Three years after Folger Levin & Kahn transferred management to a new generation of partners, the San Francisco firm is splintering. A group of 28 San Francisco litigators, including name partner Michael Kahn and litigation chair Gregory Call, will establish a beachhead for Washington, D.C.’s Crowell & Moring. One L.A. litigation partner is also joining Crowell. Peter Folger and John Levin will continue practicing with 14 others — mostly estate planning and business lawyers — under the name Folger Levin.