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Motorola will be leaning on longtime outside counsel Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz as it splits into two publicly traded companies. The mobile phone giant announced Wednesday that it expects the transaction to take place sometime in 2009. A spokesperson for Wachtell confirmed that corporate partners Patricia Vlahakis and Gregory Ostling are working on the matter for Motorola, the world's third-largest cell phone manufacturer.
Citigroup has agreed to pay $1.66 billion to Enron creditors who lost money when the energy trader collapsed in 2001. Citigroup was the last remaining defendant in what was known as the "Mega Claims" lawsuit, a bankruptcy suit filed in 2003 against 11 banks and brokerages. The filer, called Enron Creditors Recovery Corp., alleges that with the help of banks like Citigroup, Enron kept creditors in the dark about the company's financial troubles by using shady accounting.
At its height about a decade ago, Morrison & Foerster's Orange County, Calif., office had roughly 50 attorneys. Today, it has less than half that number, and the departures may continue as the firm focuses on other markets. Just last week, rainmaker Robert Naeve, who was the chairman of the Orange County office's labor and employment practice, took off for Jones Day with partner Steven Zadravecz, and associates may be following.
A company that advanced an Atlanta lawyer and his firm money for a portion of potential payouts from a sheaf of cases says that it got neither its money nor interest payments topping 100 percent annually. Lawsuit Financial sued Earl A. Davidson and his firm, Giddens, Davidson & Mitchell, in Fulton County Superior Court earlier this month to collect its $25,000 and many times that sum in fees and interest. Complicating matters is that Davidson was disbarred last month for misusing funds in his trust account.
New York City has won a victory on the insurance costs of defending against as many as 10,000 claims of respiratory and other illness by construction workers, police officers, firefighters and others who responded to the catastrophe on Sept. 11, 2001. A federal judge has ruled that Lloyd's of London and other insurers are responsible for $100 million in defense costs already incurred and what could be at least twice that amount in future costs.
Shortly after the SEC launched an investigation into accounting at Biovail Corp. in March 2005, the company turned to Howrey for help. By Monday, when the Canadian pharmaceutical company announced its settlement with the SEC, Howrey had dropped out of the picture and Curtis Mallet-Prevost had slipped in. The SEC was investigating Biovail's financial disclosure practices between 2001 and 2003. Biovail agreed to pay $10 million and to retain an independent consultant to examine its accounting practices.
Until recently, the path from law firms to in-house departments was usually a one-way trip -- but lawyers are increasingly finding that careers can go full circle. The image of in-house jobs as less demanding intermediary roles has faded, partly because the roles have evolved to become full-service functions central to major business decisions. Smith, Gambrell & Russell aviation partner Donald Mitchell says that his seven years working in-house at Delta proved to be "invaluable."
Did the practice management software you purchased fail to revolutionize your law firm overnight? Don't be embarrassed, says consultant Storm Evans, you're not necessarily a Luddite just because you can't learn everything this powerful software can do in one day.
While some attorneys may shy away from a solo career's less-than-glamorous trappings, others are attracted to the idea of building a career unique to their own interests, time constraints and even whims, without the restrictions a larger firm might impose. It's a career choice that Carolyn Elefant works to sell. In multiple ways, she's become a poster child for solo practice. Since 2002, she's hosted a blog designed for solo and small-firm lawyers. And now she has a new book, "Solo by Choice."
In a products liability case premised on a failure-to-warn theory, the plaintiff is not required to proffer an expert on warnings if an engineering expert can establish that a warning was needed to make the product safe, the 3rd Circuit has ruled. A unanimous three-judge panel found that the lower court's decision to bar the plaintiff's sole expert, and later to dismiss the case for lack of expert testimony, was premised on a faulty application of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1993 decision.
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