Posts on ‘October 27th, 2009’

Reed Smith has joined a handful of Am Law 100 firms that have dumped lockstep associate promotion and launched a new focus on associate training. The new program will divide associates into three tiers: junior, midlevel and senior. To advance, associates will need to meet a set of competencies. Courses will be available to help associates advance, and partners will be matched with associates to serve as career advisers. Reed Smith said it began work on the program 18 months ago, and it was not a response to the recession.

Ropes & Gray has made its first London lateral hire, just days after announcing the firm’s entrance into the London market. Jonathan Bloom is set to join the nascent office’s debt finance group from White & Case. His departure is a blow to White & Case’s wider banking and capital markets practice, which has seen a number of departures over the year. Bloom had practiced in the firm’s London office since January 2007, prior to which he was at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.

For the first time this year, the National Association of Women Lawyers asked firms about key rainmakers — and found very few were women. And according to NAWL’s annual survey, in the four years the survey has been conducted there has been very little change in the data on the relatively small numbers of women in leadership positions and on management committees. “The results are astounding, even to those of us familiar with the dynamics of legal business development,” NAWL said in a report on the survey.

Los Angeles firm Allen Matkins has made another cut to associate salaries and has laid off “fewer than 10″ associates, according to Mike Palmer, the firm’s executive director. The firm had an earlier round of salary cuts and layoffs in March. Palmer said that the pay cuts affected a number of associates at all levels in slow practice areas, primarily real estate and corporate, including some associates whose pay had already been reduced in March.

Is it finally game over for the shareholders of Midway Games? After Midway — maker of games including Mortal Kombat — filed for bankruptcy last February, its assets were sold to Warner Brothers, but not before the company’s former shareholders sued its former executives for securities fraud. Now, however, it looks like their claims are in mortal distress: A federal district court judge in Chicago has granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss.

A former Alabama judge was cleared Monday of charges that he spanked and sexually abused male inmates. Prosecutors portrayed former Mobile County Circuit Judge Herman Thomas as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” figure who carefully crafted an image as a mentor to troubled youth, while secretly paddling and sexually abusing young inmates for pleasure. Defense attorney Robert “Cowboy Bob” Clark described Thomas as the victim of lying felons. “He ain’t no pervert,” Clark told the jury in closing arguments.

Panelists at the Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual meeting reviewed a myriad of steps in-house departments can take to get more value from law firms, including setting guidelines for when to use outside firms; developing uniform invoice review guidelines; using templates for recurring legal matters; and using early case assessment to figure out whether to settle. Joseph West, associate GC at Wal-Mart, said the company plans to add flextime policies to its current list of criteria for evaluating outside firms.

The government and the defense opened the first Broadcom criminal stock options backdating trial to reach a jury by pinpointing the company’s eccentric CEO, its unusual options granting process and a problematic former employee who threatened to become a whistleblower. Before a packed courtroom on Friday, defense attorney Richard Marmaro sought to make clear to the jury that his client, former chief financial officer William J. Ruehle, didn’t even serve on the committee that granted the stock options in question.

A doctor’s constitutional right to courtship and marriage was not violated by New York state regulators who, in revoking his license, faulted his consensual sexual relationship with a patient who later became his fiance, a state appeals court has ruled. The court was unpersuaded by former physician Carmen A. D’Angelo’s assertion that his constitutionally guaranteed liberty interest included the right to engage in extramarital sexual relationships with his patients.