Baker & McKenzie is set to open its third office in the Gulf with the launch of an Abu Dhabi arm later this year.
The new office will mark the firm’s 69th base worldwide, and will specialise in banking and finance, corporate and M&A, private equity, securities, capital markets, projects arbitration and real estate.
Former Prague managing partner Boris Dackiw will head up the office, leading a team of 50 lawyers. He will also become managing partner of the Gulf region.
Reuters - The Supreme Court in Belarus on Friday upheld a three-year sentence on a U.S. lawyer convicted of industrial espionage, one of several irritants in Washington’s relations with the ex-Soviet state.
Linklaters has boosted its Latin-America capabilities with the hire of Shearman & Sterling’s Lat-Am head Alberto Luzarraga.
Luzarraga will join the magic circle firm’s New York office next week (3 November) from Shearman’s NY M&A group. He specialises in Latin-American cross-border transactions, and his practice focuses on public and private transactions and international joint ventures, privatisations and financings. He joined Shearman in 1986, making partner in 1995.
Luzarraga’s exp
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One-time adversaries in the landmark patent case, Morrison & Foerster’s Harold McElhinny and McKool Smith’s Samuel Baxter teamed up for a big win in a patent suit against Seoul-based Samsung Electronics. A 10-person jury in Marshall, Texas, returned a $59.3 million verdict Tuesday in favor of Tokyo-based Pioneer, which had alleged that Samsung infringed on two plasma screen patents. The case also signals a new trend of Japanese companies turning to U.S. courts for redress.
Pharmaceutical company Biopure’s defamation and trade libel case against a National Institutes of Health official for statements in an article co-authored for the raises concerns about the litigation risks of scientific discourse. The company claims that an article in the journal’s online edition falsely stated that use of the company’s Hemopure blood substitute product “is associated with significantly increased risk of death and myocardial infarction.”
After the Heller Ehrman implosion, keeping track of where the firm’s former partners wound up has been like playing a game of Guess Who. And now the big question has been answered: Former firm Chairman Matthew Larrabee has joined Dechert’s San Francisco office as a senior trial lawyer.
Four lawyers are set to guide Thelen’s wind-down. The three members of Thelen’s dissolution committee are David Graybeal, Douglas Davidson and Thomas Hill. The firm has also hired as outside counsel Peter Gilhuly, the Latham & Watkins bankruptcy partner who advised Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison on its dissolution half a decade ago. Some former Thelen partners are voicing frustration over the inclusion of Hill — the managing partner of operations at Thelen — as a member of the wind-down committee.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report Wednesday suggesting that FDA officials made changes to federal prescription labeling rules to follow a Bush administration policy of protecting drug companies. The report’s release comes as the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Monday in the landmark pre-emption case. Former FDA Chief Counsel Sheldon Bradshaw says the timing of the report’s release is no accident, and its “sole purpose is to sway the Court.”
The Federal Circuit on Thursday issued a rare full-court opinion in a closely watched case, ruling 9-3 that business methods or processes cannot be patented unless they are tied to a machine or involve a physical transformation. The case could impact the explosive growth in such patents. The three judges who dissented didn’t agree with each other either. One judge argued that the majority did not go far enough in restricting business-method patents and the other two argued for a more lenient standard.