Posts on ‘November 8th, 2009’

The United States’ largest law firms this year suffered the deepest cuts in their attorney numbers since The National Law Journal began tracking the figures more than 30 years ago. The total number of attorneys working at the top 250 law firms plunged by 5,259 lawyers. Put another way, it’s as if all of the lawyers working at two firms the size of Jones Day vanished in 2009.

Law firms are changing the way they hire, evaluate, develop, promote and pay their associates, says consultant Larry Richard. Case in point: the accelerating interest among law firms in moving from the traditional lockstep to a more performance-based “levels” system of compensation. Richard notes that for a levels system to work, a firm needs both well-functioning infrastructure systems and a widely held perception that the systems are fair and accurate. He discusses the major organizational changes required.

Day Pitney has laid off 29 staff members across eight of the firm’s nine offices stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C. In February, Day Pitney let go of 66 staff members firmwide, and in May, the firm dropped 20 lawyers.

A woman has been arrested for repeatedly harassing and threatening the New York judge who has been presiding over her divorce proceeding. According to court records, Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Sunshine initiated the action against Cheryl Uzamere after she left 10 voice messages and sent three faxes to his chambers, containing such threats as “You’re going to pay for what you’ve done” and that “the battle was to the death.”

Try as they might, lawyers from one anti-gay rights organization just can’t get any love from judges in California. After being barred from intervening in the federal challenge to Proposition 8, the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, the Campaign for California Families tried its luck Wednesday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But a conservative panel didn’t appear any more likely to let the group into the case.

Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., has been a longtime advocate of televising sessions of the U.S. Supreme Court, a quest that has repeatedly fallen on deaf ears at the high court. But in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday, Specter noted that the justices haven’t exactly been camera-shy of late, appearing in television interviews and a recent C-SPAN documentary. Specter is hoping to line up his colleagues behind a resolution he introduced Thursday that would get the “sense of the Senate” on cameras in the Court.

A law school professor has withdrawn a suit accusing legal blog Above the Law of publishing a “viciously racist series of rants” after reporting his arrest for suspicion of soliciting prostitution. David Lat, the blog’s managing editor, declined comment Thursday, but on Wednesday he wrote that there had been no settlement and that the posts Donald Marvin Jones complained about will remain on the site. Lat offered to let Jones make his case on Above the Law, but there was no word from Jones on that front as of Thursday.

The downfall of one-time power broker Scott Rothstein amid an alleged fraud that investors say cost them at least $400 million is generating new business for lawyers all over South Florida — and some of that business is coming from attorneys with the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm. Said well-known criminal defense attorney Fred Haddad, who has been retained by name partner Russell Adler, “Innocent people need a lawyer more than guilty people in something like this.”

Medical device maker Boston Scientific Corp. said Friday it will pay $296 million to settle a DOJ investigation into the company’s Guidant unit. The investigation involved product advisories issued by Guidant in 2005, a year before Boston Scientific paid $27 billion for the heart device maker. Throughout 2007, Boston Scientific agreed to various settlements over heart patients’ legal claims that Guidant knowingly sold defibrillators with potentially life-threatening defects.

A lawsuit by Amaranth, the largest hedge fund ever to fail, against J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., will go forward, following the N.Y. Appellate Division’s reinstatement yesterday of the fund’s claim for tortious interference. Amaranth, which collapsed in 2006, alleged that J.P. Morgan, the fund’s prime broker, breached its contract by refusing to release money from its margin account, which prevented Amaranth from making large trades that would have reduced the fund’s exposure.