Posts on ‘November 10th, 2009’

Almost immediately after taking office, the Obama administration set an arbitrary deadline for closing the secure terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That was the easy part. The hard part is deciding what to do with the hundreds of foreign terrorists detained at Guantanamo who, thus far, have been kept safely away from American communities, argues Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnnell.

Among those who died when an American military helicopter crashed in Afghanistan last month was DEA special agent Michael Weston, a 37-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who’d already been deployed to Iraq as a Marine three times. His wife of five months, Cynthia Tidler, has been here before. Her first husband, Helge Boes, died in Afghanistan in 2003 while serving as an operations officer for the CIA. Boes, too, was a member of Harvard Law’s class of ‘97, where he and Weston were best friends.

Levinson Axelrod has sued fired associate Edward Heyburn in an effort to shut down his online gripe site, “Levinson Axelrod Sucks.” Heyburn removed the case, which includes a claim that he violated federal anticybersquatting law, to federal court in New Jersey. The complaint notes that Heyburn “goes so far as to criticize the physical appearance” of firm attorneys, such as “the 1970’s porno mustaches.” The firm did not sue for defamation, which Heyburn calls a “concession that everything I said is true.”

MetLife agreed last week to pay $50 million — a fraction of the $8 billion sought by the class — to settle a class action claim it had defrauded 8.6 million policyholders when it converted from a mutual company in 2000 to a publicly traded one. Sources familiar with the case said the settlement was reached after a New York federal judge ruled MetLife could introduce a decision by the New York Superintendent of Insurance approving the conversion and the disclosure documents MetLife mailed to its policyholders.

The federal government moved in Monday to seize property that belonged to ousted Florida law firm Chairman Scott Rothstein, who is under investigation for allegedly running a Ponzi scheme that investors say cost them at least $500 million. The government took charge of a chunk of Gibraltar Private Bank & Trust stock and cars that Rothstein owned or gave as gifts to his former law partners. Rothstein faces no criminal charges, but assets typically are seized in fraud cases, often to be sold to repay wronged investors.

Is the long-anticipated litigation boom finally here, more than a year after the financial crisis hit? “Boom” might be too strong a word, but the latest Hildebrandt International Peer Monitor index indicates that litigation demand increased by 1.8 percent during the first three quarters of 2009 compared to the last three quarters of 2008. The index, released on Monday, tracked demand for legal services, attorney productivity, billing rates and direct and overhead expenses at large and midsize law firms.

Last summer, when the Securities and Exchange Commission sued former CSK Auto CEO Maynard Jenkins to recover $4 million he earned between 2002 and 2004, it marked the first time the SEC had brought an enforcement action solely under the clawback provision of Sarbanes-Oxley. The case surely made more than a few CEOs grab their wallets, but Jenkins’ lawyers at Munger, Tolles & Olson are trying to allay fears in a just-filed motion seeking to dismiss the action.

Semiconductor rivals TSMC and SMIC came to a settlement agreement Monday as they headed into the damages phase of an acrimonious trade secrets trial. China’s SMIC will pay Taiwan’s TSMC $200 million plus an undisclosed amount of stock and warrants, according to TSMC’s lead trial counsel, Jeffrey Chanin of Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco. The Keker lawyers had been seeking a jaw-dropping $2 billion in damages from the same jury that handed them a resounding victory last week.

The Supreme Court appeared divided Monday over whether states violate the Constitution by imposing a sentence of life without parole on juveniles who commit nonhomicide offenses. The justices heard arguments in two separate cases from Florida in which lawyers argued that the sentences for their clients constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Both lawyers relied heavily on the analysis in the Court’s 2005 decision striking down the death penalty for juvenile murderers.

During the past 51 years, federal courts have used a hodgepodge of tests to determine a corporation’s “principal place of business.” The U.S. Supreme Court today, for the first time, will consider what is the correct test in a case involving Hertz employees who claim the company violated California’s wage-and-hour laws. What the Supreme Court decides, in effect, will determine the battlefields on which class action and other litigation involving multistate corporations will be fought.