Posts on ‘February 25th, 2010’

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick says there’s good reason he can’t afford to make a $79,011 restitution payment he owes from a text messaging scandal: He has to maintain a high-class lifestyle for his job. That contention is at the heart of an emergency motion filed this week in an attempt to postpone a probation-violation hearing. Kilpatrick’s lawyer contends that Kilpatrick doesn’t have the money and that, to earn it, he must “function in the upper echelons of society.”

Patent firm Fish & Richardson did $300,000 worth of patent prosecution work for Openwave Systems from 2000 to 2007, and now Openwave and its lawyers at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius want Fish disqualified from representing Openwave’s opponent in what stands to be a much juicier piece of litigation. The conflicts issue is a constant challenge for the few patent boutiques like Fish that have patent prosecution and litigation practices. And it’s why most big general practice firms don’t have big patent prosecution practices.

DLA Piper’s U.S. operations report that gross revenue declined nearly 14 percent in 2009, to just over a billion dollars. Revenue per lawyer and profits per equity partner fell only about 5 percent, due to cuts in the firm’s lawyer ranks; DLA laid off 101 U.S. associates last year. Firm Chairman Frank Burch said the firm broadly cut its expenses and improved its balance sheet by increasing its reliance on paid-in partner capital, while continuing to attract high-profile laterals.

Securities plaintiffs attorney Patrick Coughlin will soon scale back his duties and take his name off the letterhead at San Diego-based Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins. Coughlin will become of counsel at the end of June and will step down from the executive committee. At the same time, the 180-lawyer firm is promoting Michael Dowd to name partner. By the end of March, the firm will go by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd.

After more than six hours of deliberation, a Philadelphia jury unanimously returned a defense verdict Wednesday in a lawsuit alleging that a hormone replacement therapy drug caused breast cancer in an Indiana woman who died of the disease. The verdict in favor of drugmaker Wyeth came because the jury found a lack of factual causation of Cheryl Foust’s disease by her use of the HRT drug Prempro. The defense in the case, however, did not get all of the answers it wanted on the questions presented to the jury.

Prosecutors must produce memos by high-ranking Justice Department officials on the transfers of an accused terrorist because they might explain why he was kept out of the criminal justice system for almost five years, a New York federal judge has ruled. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, in an opinion unsealed Wednesday, ruled on Jan. 21 that the discovery obligations of prosecutors extend to the memos because DOJ officials can rightly be considered part of the “government” within the meaning of Rule 16 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Seyfarth Shaw on Wednesday rolled out more details on how its new merit-based compensation system for associates will work. The new merit levels will be the basis for how much the firm charges clients for associates’ legal services, the firm said. The system may be unique in spelling out a link between client billing rates and associate pay, says one consultant. While clients may appreciate knowing what level of service they’re paying for, he added that clients may also shy away from hiring the lowest performers.

Lawmakers fired questions Wednesday at two Toyota executives about whether the company’s lobbyists are too cozy with government regulators and whether those relationships slowed the response to complaints about the automaker’s safety record. The hearing, the second on Capitol Hill this week, also served as a forum for lawmakers to debate proposals related to the U.S. tort system. One Democrat warned Toyota president Akio Toyoda that the automaker should expect significant losses as a result of products liability lawsuits.

Once the first step in implementing an effective written litigation hold is taken and a trigger event to preserve evidence is identified, the organization needs to analyze the implications of the event, say Howett Isaza partner John Isaza and Goldberg Segalla partner John J. Jablonski.

An Italian criminal court judge has convicted three Google executives,
including chief legal officer David Drummond, for footage on the
company’s now defunct video-sharing platform that prosecutors say
violated that country’s privacy laws. Though the Google executives don’t
face any prison time, the verdict still is a huge setback, especially
considering the liability precedent it could set in Europe, according to
defense attorney Samuel Buffone, who says this is the sort of thing that
could “break the Internet.”