Posts from ‘January, 2010’

Reed Smith reached the $1 million profits per equity partner mark in 2009 with a 7 percent increase. Although revenues could have reached the $1 billion milestone with a mild rise, they instead dipped by 3.8 percent, to $942 million. Reed Smith managed the feat of raising profits on falling revenue by squeezing the traditional pyramid structure: While the equity partnership grew by 4 percent, the firm shrank the ranks of non-equity lawyers by nearly 6 percent, and staff by about 4 percent.

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed drug charges against former Broadcom Chief Executive Officer Henry Nicholas and threw out a plea deal reached between prosecutors and a witness in a related stock-options backdating prosecution. In a related civil complaint, the judge gave the Securities and Exchange Commission seven days to file amended securities fraud charges against Nicholas and three other former Broadcom executives, telling an SEC attorney that he found “serious problems of proof” with the existing complaint.

Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are not liable for nearly $100 billion in losses allegedly incurred by a group of investors in mortgage-backed securities issued by Lehman Brothers, a federal judge has ruled, granting the rating agencies’ motion to dismiss the investors’ suit. The judge sided with Moody’s and S&P, who said they were not liable under the Securities Act of 1933 as either underwriters or sellers.

Roy Pearson Jr., the former administrative law judge who famously sued over a lost pair of pants, is now picking a fight with federal Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, who tossed Pearson’s suit for damages that targeted — among others — Washington, D.C., officials and judges. Pearson said in court papers that Huvelle should have recused from hearing the suit, citing Huvelle’s “enthusiastic participation” in an “arm-in-arm ’sisterhood’ photo” with Superior Court Judge Anita Josey-Herring, who is a defendant in Pearson’s suit.

Lawyers for owners of a mortgage-free Florida home that Bank of America attempted to foreclose on are bringing an arsenal of legal claims against the banking giant, ranging from obvious claims like conversion and trespass to more unexpected ones like defamation and libel. Massachusetts residents Charlie and Maria Cardoso claim in their suit that Bank of America intimidated the tenant living in their house into leaving and that the foreclosure attempt harmed their reputation with friends and family.

An Ohio man who accepted an approximately $100,000 settlement for his Vioxx personal injury claim has filed a negligence suit against three Houston firms and three Houston lawyers, alleging the defendants made paperwork errors in his case file that reduced the size of his settlement. Craig Pingle alleges that he should have received a settlement totaling more than $436,000.

Wednesday’s congressional hearing on the bailout of American International Group did little to answer a key question: Who ordered lawyers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to try to hide details of bailout payments? Given that committee members kept asking each witness that question during the hearing, it’s presumably safe to assume that none of the thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents provided an answer. Numerous powerful individuals denied being involved in the secrecy decision.

Noncommercial speech doesn’t lose its broad First Amendment protections even when it’s tucked into a thicket of advertising, a California appellate court held Thursday. A unanimous three-justice panel dismissed a lawsuit against Rolling Stone brought by a class of indie rockers. Led by bands Xiu Xiu and Fucked Up, the plaintiffs accused the magazine of trading on the names of 186 groups listed in a five-page article to sell four pages of neighboring advertisements to R.J. Reynolds in the November 2007 edition.

Two former clients have sued Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, charging the firm with malpractice, breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract over the firm’s work on the financing of a failed Nebraska ethanol project. In a complaint filed Tuesday in state court in San Francisco, Medley Capital and Fourth Third allege that Milbank lawyers failed to secure a first, secured interest in the ethanol project for the former clients. The firm’s work on the matter occurred from March 2007 to March 2009.

The topic of the panel discussion was “Women Advocates of the Supreme Court Bar,” and among the speakers were the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice and its first female U.S. solicitor general. But in spite of the accomplishments of Sandra Day O’Connor and Elena Kagan and the other panelists, the free-flowing discussion on Thursday afternoon in Washington, D.C., left the sense that full equality of treatment for women lawyers has not yet been achieved.