Posts from ‘May, 2010’

Virginia will become a major battleground in the Obama administration’s attack on national financial fraud cases, federal and state authorities said today. U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride and other officials announced the creation of the Virginia Financial and Securities Fraud Task Force — a coalition of state and federal agencies, both civil and criminal, to investigate and prosecute white-collar crimes that extend beyond Virginia.

Three key Supreme Court decisions, including one rejecting liability for lawyers, accountants and bankers who aid and abet in the violation of securities laws, survived attempts to overturn them during the Senate’s consideration of landmark financial reform legislation. Despite support from a coalition of consumer, investor, labor and other groups, an amendment targeting two of the decisions failed to reach a vote before the lawmakers moved Thursday night to halt cloture debate and take a final vote on the reform bill.

U.S. intellectual property owners can exclude illegal imports by enforcing their rights at the International Trade Commission. To be successful before the ITC, an owner needs to be prepared and persistent. According to Dean A. Pelletier, shareholder at McAndrews, it takes 10 steps.

A documentary filmmaker has been given more time to decide whether to comply with a subpoena that he turn over outtakes from a film on environmental litigation against Chevron in Ecuador. A New York federal judge on Thursday denied the filmmaker’s request for a stay pending appeal of an earlier order approving subpoenas for footage from his movie “Crude,” but nonetheless gave him 10 more days to comply. Chevron claims the footage shows corruption in the Ecuadorean judicial system and misconduct by a plaintiffs lawyer.

Illinois authorities have finally come to a conclusion: A lawyer who worked at three Am Law 100 firms will be suspended from practicing law for three years for leaving crucial information out of his law school application and for altering his transcripts to land a summer associate gig at Sidley Austin. The initial recommendation for a three-year suspension had been cut in half in January, but this week the Illinois Supreme Court jacked the suspension back up to three years.

The hot-button issue of “sexting” is coming back to court and this time the ACLU is setting out to establish that high school students have a right to privacy that includes the contents of their cell phones. A team of lawyers from Cozen O’Connor has partnered with the ACLU of Pennsylvania to sue on behalf of a student who claims her constitutional rights were violated when the principal confiscated her cell phone, found nude images she had taken of herself and turned it over to prosecutors.