Posts on ‘March 1st, 2010’

Swiss news agencies reported Wednesday that the government would ask Zurich-based banking giant UBS to reimburse it for outside legal costs stemming from the bank’s long-running legal dispute with U.S. authorities over allegations of tax evasion by U.S. citizens holding UBS accounts. A deal to resolve that dispute by releasing the names of 4,450 U.S. citizens with UBS accounts was tentatively struck last August.

Questions you ask as a job candidate are just as important as those asked by the interviewer, note consultants Valerie Fontaine and Roberta Kass. You can use questions not only to learn more about the employer, but also to demonstrate your knowledge and express your interest.

Frank Gaylord, now 85, won a government-sponsored contest to sculpt a memorial to Korean War veterans in Washington, D.C. in 1990. In 1995, John Alli took hundreds of photographs of the memorial on a snowy day and eventually produced a single, haunting photo. In 2002, the federal government paid Alli $1,500 to use his photo as the basis for a 37-cent postage stamp. Gaylord, who essentially got nothing along the way, sued for copyright infringement. On Thursday the Federal Circuit ruled in Gaylord’s favor.

Dewey & LeBoeuf saw a dramatic drop in gross revenue in 2009 while profits per equity partner moved up 3.4 percent, the result of a 10 percent decrease in equity partner headcount, according to numbers released by the firm Friday. The firm attributes the substantial drop in revenue to a sizable decrease in headcount, as well as to the overall downturn in business activity. But intensive cost-cutting measures and 20 fewer equity partners helped to mitigate the effect on average profits earned by equity partners.

The Federal Trade Commission will appeal an October ruling that stripped the agency of its authority to enforce new anti-fraud rules against lawyers. The so-called “Red Flags” regulations are designed to prevent identity theft, and the FTC argues that the regulations must apply to all “creditors” — including lawyers — in order to comply with federal law. But the ABA disputes that interpretation, citing a 2005 decision by the D.C. Circuit that ended another attempt by the FTC to impose regulations on lawyers.

Debevoise & Plimpton on Friday revealed that gross revenue dropped 12 percent and profits per equity partner suffered an even steeper fall last year as the recession caught up with the New York-based firm. Revenue declined to $667.9 million in 2009, while profits per partner fell 16 percent to $1.87 million. The declines came amid a downturn in corporate work and the completion of some large matters in its litigation practices, namely the internal investigation of Siemens AG.

The Justice Department has turned to the D.C. Circuit in the hope of forcing Deloitte to turn over tax-related documents that government lawyers say are not protected by the work product privilege. As part of a civil tax suit, the government is seeking documents Dow Chemical gave to Deloitte during an audit. On Friday, a DOJ lawyer argued in court that privilege does not apply to the documents because they were prepared during what the lawyer called the ordinary course of business, rather than for litigation purposes.

For $95, plaintiffs lawyers can buy a book that teaches how to appeal to jurors’ basic survival instincts, those that emanate from humans’ “reptilian” brains. “When the Reptile sees a survival danger, she protects her genes by impelling the juror to protect himself and the community,” write co-authors Don C. Keenan, an Atlanta plaintiffs lawyer, and David Ball, a North Carolina jury consultant. But in a recent wrongful death trial, Keenan found that defense lawyers will also buy the book — and use it against him.

President Obama says he is determined to repeal the federal law that requires lesbian and gay service members to remain silent about their sexual orientation on pain of discharge. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and some Pentagon brass agree the law should go. Yet when the government’s lawyers appeared for a federal court hearing on Feb. 18, it was to defend the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law against a constitutional challenge — or at least argue for leaving it alone for now.

New York University is entitled to recover legal fees for battling to preserve the remaining assets of a hedge fund from which a prominent New York financier pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, a Supreme Court justice in Manhattan has ruled. The judge found, over the opposition of the New York AG’s office, that the benefit NYU conferred on investors in the $1.3 billion Ariel Fund was “of such a great measure” that it would be “inequitable” not to compensate its attorneys.