Posts on ‘February 5th, 2010’

Skycaps across the country who claim they lost tips after American Airlines imposed $2 curbside baggage fees can now join a Boston lawsuit. U.S. District Court Judge William Young on Thursday certified a national class action suit against the airline. The class action lawsuit comes 18 months after a federal jury awarded nine current and former American Airlines skycaps from Massachusetts $325,000 for tips they lost as a result of the baggage fees.

Criminal defense lawyers representing former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his campaign manager/brother Robert Blagojevich will rework their legal strategies after the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago lodged new extortion and bribery charges against the defendants on Thursday. The government had said that it would bring the new charges mainly to beef up its case in light of the possibility that the Supreme Court will find unconstitutional a type of charge included in the original indictments.

The U.S. economy continued to hemorrhage jobs in the first month of the 2010, but the overall unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent, according to the latest employment report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the legal sector lost another 1,100 jobs in January, the number marked a noticeable drop-off from previous months. Since January of last year the legal services industry shed 44,700 workers.

LegalTech New York felt like a user conference this year, says Sean Doherty, Law.com’s technology editor. Although the messages sent from vendors were mixed, a number of threads appeared that set the tone for the show and marked a direction for tech in the new year: full speed ahead.

Lawyers were scratching their heads Thursday over seemingly conflicting rulings by the 3rd Circuit in a pair of closely watched student-speech cases involving high school students suspended for creating fake MySpace pages on their home computers to ridicule their principals. Although the cases appeared to raise nearly identical legal questions about the limits on a school’s power to discipline students for off-campus speech, the court sided with the student in one case and with the school in the other case.

A draft settlement has been negotiated in about 10,000 suits seeking damages for ailments allegedly incurred in the first response and massive cleanup after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Pressure is mounting in the litigation as both sides prepare for a trial on 12 “bellwether” cases brought by plaintiffs who claim that New York City, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and more than 70 contractors failed to warn and protect workers who responded to the catastrophe and took part in the cleanup.