Posts on ‘November 20th, 2009’

Cassidy & Associates vice chairman Gregg Hartley didn’t like a critical New York Times story on one of the firm’s biggest clients, Equatorial Guinea. So he’s hitting back against the reporter using an unusual vehicle: his personal Twitter feed. The reporter’s father, a federal judge, presided over a high-profile case involving Equatorial Guinea. Hartley acknowledged that he hadn’t verified the connection before tweeting. “Here’s one thing about social media. You don’t have to always be right,” he said.

The federal judiciary saw a huge spike in online applications for clerkships from last year, according to a release from the judiciary. The Web site used by about two-thirds of all federal judges to find clerks saw 401,576 electronic applications between Oct. 1, 2008 and Sept. 30, 2009. That’s a 66 percent increase from that time period last year, when 241,529 applications were turned in. The applications came from only 10,722 applicants this year, meaning each applied for an average of about 38 clerkships.

A South Florida jury has ordered Philip Morris USA to pay $300 million to a former smoker, agreeing that the tobacco company’s negligence was the cause of her emphysema. The award for Cindy Naugle, 61, is the largest to date among 8,000 lawsuits filed in the state against tobacco companies. The award amounts to $56 million in compensatory and $244 million in punitive damages against Philip Morris USA, a unit of Altria Group. The company said it will seek further review of the verdict.

A controversy has been brewing in law firms as more documents find their way into Microsoft SharePoint’s SQL Server: Is SharePoint a viable replacement for a DMS? Mark Gerow, of Fenwick & West, discusses the case for moving documents out of SQL Server using an “External Blob Store.”

The government made the right call. In retrying former McKesson HBOC Chairman Charles McCall, prosecutors decided not to put one-time cooperator and former CEO Albert Bergonzi on the stand. That forced McCall’s lawyers to summon Bergonzi instead, and the jury didn’t think much of his testimony. The jury convicted McCall on Thursday on four securities fraud counts and one charge of circumventing accounting controls. They acquitted the company’s former GC, Jay Lapine, on each of the three counts he faced.

The liquidation plan administrator for the Coudert Brothers estate is claiming that Baker & McKenzie breached an agreement with the defunct law firm by failing to hand over a portion of a contingency fee earned from work for former Coudert clients. The claims against Baker & McKenzie, contained in an amended complaint filed in bankruptcy court last week, involve a contingency fee that could be as high as $17 million.

More companies are paying their outside counsel off the clock, according to the Hildebrandt 2009 Law Department Survey. Just over half of the 231 companies surveyed said they either have started or will start negotiating non-hourly billing arrangements with their outside counsel. The results weren’t surprising to Lauren Chung, director of Hildebrandt’s law department consulting practice and the survey’s editor. “Everyone wants to do it,” she says. “But the question is: to what extent?”