Posts from ‘February, 2010’

Anti-corruption enforcement is bulking up. Already the acknowledged leader in global enforcement, the Department of Justice unit that prosecutes Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases will soon grow “substantially,” according to the lawyer who runs it. Mark Mendelsohn, deputy chief of the fraud section’s criminal division, said his section “may grow as much as 50 percent in size in the next year or two.” At the same time, he added, he expects companies to play an increasingly aggressive role in thwarting corruption.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is taking on a courtroom role for the first time since he was the special prosecutor in the 2007 I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial. Fitzgerald joined the prosecution team Wednesday in Chicago at a court hearing in a case against two alleged terrorists. David Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana were indicted last year on charges that they conspired to kill employees at the Danish newspaper that published drawings of Allah, and aided in the 2008 attack in Mumbai.

Large patent hoarder Intellectual Ventures says it’s taking a new customer-friendly approach. The company, which owns around 30,000 patents, for the first time assigned one of its members a patent to use as ammunition in a lawsuit. Verizon Communications, which agreed to pay IV as much as $350 million in a 2008 deal, is using one of IV’s patents to strike back at TiVo in a patent fight. This is new talk from IV, whose secrecy and vague business plans have caused big tech companies to worry in the past.

Once the first steps in implementing an effective written litigation hold are taken and a trigger event to preserve evidence is initiated, the organization needs to define the scope of the legal hold, say Howett Isaza partner John Isaza and Goldberg Segalla partner John J. Jablonski.

Lateral partner hiring by U.S. firms in London fell to its lowest level since 2004 last year, according to new research from Legal Week. A survey of hiring trends at the London operations of 37 of the biggest U.S. and trans-Atlantic firms found there were just 59 lateral partner moves in 2009, with many firms shying away from expansion against the backdrop of the global recession. Greenberg Traurig Maher, which launched in London in June 2009, was responsible for a quarter of those hires.

Federal prosecutors are beefing up their case against Web radio talk show host Harold “Hal” Turner, charged with encouraging listeners to murder three federal appellate judges. In Turner’s retrial, which starts next week in New York, prosecutors plan to call those judges to the stand. Turner was indicted after he posted Internet messages that said the judges “deserve to be killed” for allowing a Chicago handgun ban to stand. Turner has argued that he’s just a shock jock exercising his First Amendment rights.