Posts on ‘March 5th, 2010’

Media coverage goes with the territory in high-stakes litigation and experienced lawyers take it as a matter of course that they will need to craft a strategy for handling it. Consultant Carl Whitaker provides tips for meeting the press, based on his discussions with media-savvy lawyers.

About a dozen major corporations, including Prudential Financial, DuPont and Microsoft, pledged Thursday to spend $30 million in 2010 on minority- and women-owned law firms as part of a new commitment called the Inclusion Initiative. In-house lawyers at DuPont and Prudential hatched the idea and recruited in-house lawyers at other companies to build a larger coalition, says Prudential GC Susan Blount. Other companies in the coalition include American Airlines, Accenture, Comcast and General Mills.

In a rare written dissent, Judge Robert S. Smith has taken his six
colleagues on the New York Court of Appeals to task for not finding the
“substantial constitutional question” that would allow them to review a
judge’s denial of an attorney’s pistol permit. Smith said the court’s
refusal to hear the appeal highlights the “amorphous definition” that
judges have attached to “substantial” and how it is at odds with
provisions of the state constitution and state law governing the right
to appeal in civil cases.

The SEC charged a prominent Miami business leader and his wife with fraud Wednesday, alleging they conducted a $135 million Ponzi scheme involving real estate investments from hundreds of elderly Cuban-American investors. The SEC alleged that Gaston Cantens and Teresita Cantens, founders of Royal West Properties, “portrayed themselves as a pious couple” and gained the trust of investors “in typical affinity fraud fashion by cultivating an impression within their community that it was a privilege to invest with them.”

The fees charged by H&R Block and other tax preparers for electronic filing of federal tax returns are not illegal and the IRS’s agreement with the preparers didn’t violate antitrust laws, the 3rd Circuit has ruled. A unanimous three-judge panel refused to revive a proposed nationwide class action against H&R Block, Intuit and the IRS brought by taxpayers who claim the IRS effectively “outsourced” its statutory responsibility for accepting and processing e-filed tax returns to private companies.

New York personal injury attorney Evan Torgan should not face disciplinary action for the circumstances under which he signed a paralyzed victim of the 2003 Staten Island Ferry disaster to a retainer agreement, a U.S. magistrate judge has recommended. However, the judge also recommended that federal Judge Jack Weinstein reject Torgan’s motion to reverse Weinstein’s decision reducing the lawyer’s fee from 33 percent of the $18.3 million verdict to 20 percent, finding the fee reduction did not constitute an “undue hardship.”

TiVo prevailed yet again in a long-running dispute with Dish Network over patents for digital video recorders, as the Federal Circuit cleared the way Thursday for TiVo to collect millions of dollars. TiVo said the decision, if it stands, would let it collect at least $300 million from Dish: about $100 million in damages and interest, and the rest in contempt sanctions that TiVo already has been awarded. That would be on top of about $100 million in damages that Dish had already paid TiVo in earlier litigation.

A public squabble over the contents of internal documents produced by a former Toyota attorney has broken out between the chairman and the ranking Republican member of the congressional panel investigating safety problems in Toyota vehicles. At issue: claims by Dimitrios Biller, a former in-house lawyer at Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc., who asserted in a wrongful termination lawsuit that his superiors regularly ordered him to hide and destroy evidence in rollover cases.