Posts from ‘October, 2009’

The elderly are increasingly filing complaints against their brokers for conning them into bad investments, say securities fraud attorneys, noting that bad times reveal the truth of shoddy deals. The latest alleged victims are the Carmels of Florida — an 82-year-old man and his 75-year-old wife — who claim their Bank of America broker cozied up to them, gained their trust and then stuck them with a bad investment that cost them more than $1.4 million.

The Securities Investor Protection Corp. will advance more than $500 million to victims of Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme, the trustee charged with liquidating Madoff’s investment firm said Wednesday. The amount is a fraction of the $4.43 billion in claims approved since Madoff’s arrest in December, the trustee, Baker Hostetler’s Irving H. Picard, said. Picard, who so far has recovered $1.4 billion for the estate, said the balance “will have to be paid out of the pro rata distributions we get.”

Prohibiting someone from making money for donating an irreplaceable kidney is one thing. But what about donating bone marrow, which replenishes itself within weeks? That question is at the heart of a new lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. Citing a “desperate shortage of unrelated marrow donors,” patients and health care advocates are suing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to enjoin enforcement of provisions that criminalize the compensation of donors.

In June, when the U.S. Supreme Court asked Solicitor General Elena Kagan to weigh in on the 2nd Circuit’s precedent-setting “F-cubed” ruling in Morrison v. National Australia Bank, it looked like the high court was getting securities litigation fever. Just days before, it had decided to take on Merck v. Reynolds, which raised the issue of how the statute of limitations should apply in shareholder cases. But in a brief filed Tuesday, the SG seems to be trying to cool the Court’s ardor.

Firms across South Florida slashed expenses this year by cutting attorneys and staff, renegotiating with vendors and eliminating lavish firm dinners and retreats, according to a Daily Business Review survey of 76 area law firm leaders. Revenue per lawyer dropped or remained flat at 48 percent of firms last year, with large firms hardest hit, according to the survey. And just 34 percent of managing partners expect increased partner profits this year compared with 70 percent last year.

The trial of Taylar Nuevelle, a convicted felon accused of stalking a Washington, D.C., Superior Court judge with whom she had a yearlong relationship, has been recessed until Monday after the defendant spent Wednesday morning in the hospital with an undisclosed medical emergency. The judge ordered that Nuevelle be stripped of her passport after the prosecutor argued that Nuevelle has a history of delaying trials with bogus medical claims and once absconded to England for three years in the midst of custody hearings.

A former in-house lawyer for Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. has filed court papers defending his claims that the automaker engaged in an illegal racketeering conspiracy to destroy and hide electronic discovery in rollover cases. In papers filed Monday, Dimitrios Biller, Toyota’s former managing counsel, claims he was “forced out of business, sued, harassed, defrauded, threatened, intimidated, left unemployed, rendered unemployable, defamed, and publicly ridiculed by Defendants.”

The accounting fraud case against former McKesson HBOC executives has gone topsy-turvy as the government’s main cooperator is now officially a defense witness. In opening statements Tuesday, Paul Weiss’ Theodore Wells Jr., who represents ex-CEO Charles McCall, told the jury he will call Albert Bergonzi to the stand. Once company president, Bergonzi pleaded guilty and testified for the government in its bid to convict McCall and former GC Jay Lapine. Both were acquitted on one count, as the jury hung on several others.