Posts on ‘February 9th, 2010’

Robert Matthews, a commercial litigation partner in Faegre & Benson’s Boulder office, died Saturday when a small plane he was piloting collided in midair with another plane some 8,000 feet over the Colorado city, according to the Daily Camera of Boulder. The crash killed the 58-year-old Matthews, his 56-year-old brother Mark and the pilot of the other plane, which CNN reports was a single-seat Piper Pawnee towing a glider.

Electronic privacy in the workplace is a tangled subject, with only a few sure footholds for employers. Attorneys are hoping a Supreme Court ruling will provide unifying guidance on employer monitoring of employee text messages in a case currently under consideration by the justices.

The largest individual award to a former Florida smoker against the tobacco industry will not stand, a Broward Circuit judge ruled Friday. Calling the $300 million jury verdict “shocking,” Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld said he would determine a lower award later against Philip Morris USA. The jury’s decision to award $56.5 million in compensatory damages and $244 million in punitive damages stemmed from anger, said Streitfeld, who faulted tobacco company attorneys for putting on a “blame the smoker” defense.

A formidable team of lawyers has lined up to defend Dr. Conrad Murray, who was charged Monday with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson. Murray’s lead lawyer is Ed Chernoff, a partner at criminal defense firm Stradley Chernoff, who is handling the case with firm partners Matthew Alford and William Stradley. Also on the defense team: California lawyers Michael Flanagan and Joseph Low. Murray faces up to four years in prison if convicted.

New York federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff grilled attorneys for the SEC on Monday about a proposed $150 million settlement that would bring an end to two actions against the Bank of America Corp. stemming from its $50 billion takeover of Merrill Lynch in 2008. The actions accuse the bank of failing to disclose to shareholders that it had authorized Merrill to pay up to $5.8 billion in bonuses in 2008 and of keeping shareholders in the dark about “extraordinary” losses Merrill sustained two months before the merger.

Federal prosecutors have been stepping up their Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement efforts in recent months, and on Friday they landed a big catch they’d been targeting for some time. BAE Systems, the largest military contractor in Europe, has agreed to pay nearly $450 million as part of a global settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office that will resolve longstanding allegations of foreign corruption.

A 9th Circuit panel has slapped the state of California with sanctions after the attorney general filed a fifth meritless appeal in ongoing prison conditions litigation. The $13,500 in sanctions is minuscule compared to the millions of dollars the state has paid to defend class actions brought by inmates over medical and mental health care. But it’s also indicative of state leaders’ almost automatic inclination to challenge many of the prison-related orders handed down by federal courts and court-appointed receivers.

Pictures made of “Amy” — as she’s known in court papers — when she was 8 or 9 are among the most widely circulated child pornography images online. A decade later, the woman is taking aim at anyone who would view the images and seeking restitution in hundreds of criminal cases. Her requests and those from other child pornography victims are forcing judges to grapple with tough questions: Is someone who possesses an abusive image responsible for the harm suffered by a particular child? And how much should that person pay?