If Daniel Hurstel’s schedule on Thursday was anything to go by, the Paris legal market is in decent health. The head of Willkie Farr’s office there, Hurstel was frantically attempting to juggle two deals while explaining parts of the firm’s strategy in London. The Paris mood is cautious, but it falls short of the outright pessimism of New York or the uncertainty of London. For Willkie and Orrick, Paris has become the power base of their European operations as they put expansion plans to the fore.
Defense firm Margolis Edelstein is currently involved in litigation with a former partner in its Wilmington, Del., office over allegations that the former partner breached his fiduciary duties to the firm. Margolis Edelstein alleges that Jeffrey K. Martin ceased acting as a partner in the firm and acted solely for his own benefit prior to his resignation from the firm, including soliciting firm clients to transfer business to himself, according to court papers.
The next time pro-industry Republicans in Washington state, Oregon or Idaho saber-rattle about splitting the 9th Circuit because it’s too cozy with environmentalists, don’t be surprised if judges use as a shield. Several judges on an en banc court in that case Thursday appeared ready to overturn the panel decision that had enjoined a logging project in Idaho. The U.S. Forest Service had approved the project, despite concerns about its impact on wildlife.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will once again hear an appeal in a class action suit filed in 1993 over the way H&R Block worked its rapid refund program. The justices will decide whether the Superior Court misapplied the aggrieved party doctrine and whether it erred in rejecting the trial court’s ruling that H&R Block’s claims could be tried on a classwide basis.
The Supreme Court of Georgia has upheld a $13 million judgment against Ford Motor in a suit brought by the widower of a woman killed when a truck slammed into the rear of her 1985 Mercury Marquis, leading to her death at the scene, according to a brief in the case. Plaintiffs lawyers’ theory was that Ford’s design of the Marquis made the fuel tank too vulnerable and that the design of a trailer hitch made by co-defendant Draw-Tite involved dangerous bolts that punctured the tank, resulting in the fire.
In a stern order and opinion, a federal judge has rapped a trio of health care companies for failing to comply with discovery requests. In a contract dispute between the companies and a pharmaceutical business that sued them, the judge found that the defendants’ have “clearly and blatantly failed to meet their discovery obligations,” and that their reasons for not producing documents, answers and witnesses varied from “unacceptable” and “unpersuasive” to “ridiculous.”
Carl Malamud and other digital activists are piling up case law in public archives, moving toward a vision of the Web in which words in a given judge’s decision are hyperlinked to other decisions, or to academic analysis, through the efforts of Internet users organized in social networking collectives.
Listening to its GC might well have saved New Century Financial, once the nation’s second-largest subprime mortgage lender, from plunging into bankruptcy. That’s one lesson from a report filed by Michael Missal, appointed by New Century’s bankruptcy trustee to investigate the company’s problems. Missal wrote that former New Century general counsel Stergios Theologides recognized the high risk of subprime mortgages and warned senior managers about it in a memo in the fall of 2004. But no one paid attention.
A former Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal partner has won his trial seeking higher compensation from the firm. Jurors determined that for years 2003 and 2004, the firm should have paid Douglas Rosenthal $500,000 per year rather than the over-$400,000 he received, and that for 2005 and 2006, he should have received $1,365,000 per year instead of the over-$1 million offered by the firm. The jury also awarded Sonnenschein $300,000, finding that Rosenthal and his new firm had interfered with Sonnenschein clients.
Fresh off a major courtroom victory over Hynix Semiconductor and other manufacturers, Rambus says it’s considering seeking an injunction against Hynix to keep it from making memory chips that infringe on its patents. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, such orders have been less frequent. The specter also brings to the fore the debate over whether patent holders should be allowed to get an injunction over patents that are used in industry standards, like those at issue here.