Posts on ‘February 23rd, 2010’

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a corporation’s principal place of business is where the company’s executives work, not where the company’s products are sold. The unanimous ruling by the high court likely will make it harder to sue out-of-state corporations in state courts, which are considered friendlier to class-action lawsuits than are federal courts.

Judge Scheindlin’s most recent e-discovery opinion is a practical roadmap on how real people and real attorneys may be confronted by challenges regarding compliance, says Herzfeld & Rubin member Michael Hoenig. It is also a how-to manual that sets forth key principles relating to EDD.

A Philadelphia jury awarded $6 million in punitive damages and $3.45 million in compensatory damages Monday to a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer after taking Wyeth’s hormonal drug Prempro. According to plaintiffs counsel, the case is the first in the United States involving a plaintiff diagnosed with breast cancer well after the July 2002 release of the Women’s Health Initiative, a randomized, controlled trial of the risks and benefits of hormone replacement.

A majority of the Supreme Court appeared sympathetic on Monday to the Obama administration’s arguments that attorney fee awards under a key fee shifting statute belong to the clients, not the attorneys who earn them, and the awards can be offset to pay debts owed to the government. The case, Astrue v. Ratliff, which concerns the Equal Access to Justice Act, is one of nearly a dozen cases this term in which the justices face questions concerning the practice of law and attorney behavior.

Toyota executives head to Capitol Hill today for the first of three hearings on the automaker’s product safety record — a trip to the political woodshed that could get the company into a deeper legal thicket in courts around the country. Plaintiffs lawyers on Monday said they will be watching testimony closely. So, too, presumably, will prosecutors and regulators who are mounting investigations into Toyota’s handling of braking and acceleration problems in several of its vehicles.

While his peers spent the past few months worrying about billing the requisite hours and keeping their desk jobs, Maj. Frank “Gus” Biggio helped build a forward operating base and kept his eyes peeled for IEDs. Biggio, a Marine Corps reservist and fourth-year associate in Patton Boggs’ Washington, D.C., office, recently returned to the firm after spending seven months leading a civil affairs unit in Nawa, a restive region in southern Afghanistan where Marines are currently taking part in an offensive.