New York lawyer Emanuel Zeltser awoke on a private plane headed for a KGB-monitored detention center in Belarus last March. His last memory before waking was drinking coffee at a London cafe. Since then, he’s been held at three prison facilities in the former Soviet country, deprived of medications and physically tortured. He is now languishing in a KGB penal colony. It sounds like a nightmare, but these are the details in a complaint filed by Patton Boggs lawyers with the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
In 2008, e-discovery saw its most active year to date, with opinions ranging from meet-and-confers to issues in search and retrieval. Ryely Carlock’s Cecil Lynn III and Alexander Hicks review the cases and predict what the new year promises for electronically stored information.
Bad economic times create opportunities for strong companies to poach good employees from a weakened competitor. Attorney David Walton offers steps that companies and their counsel can take to prevent trade secret theft and to act effectively if they believe a departing or new employee has stolen critical information. Whether you’re the company losing the employee or the new employer, these steps could improve your legal position and ultimately minimize the threat to your business.
Presenting proposed rules for law firm Web sites to the state Supreme Court, the Florida Bar’s attorney contended lawyers should be allowed to post client testimonials and past successes. But the justices did not seem too keen on less stringent rules for online legal advertising.
Big Law partners often get a bad rap for being mean, evil, whip-crackers whose sole purpose is to dampen the hopes, dreams and spirits of little innocent Cogs. The Snark tells us that the generalization is simply unfair. Not all partners are evil and they are not the only source for spirit-crushing behavior. Some of the meanest spirit-crushers are other Cogs. In particular, crusty old crotchety senior associates. Take The Snark’s test to find out if one of the Crotchety Cogs in your firm is you.
Early last autumn, for a very short while, the credit mess looked as though it was just an American problem. Europe sat back and prepared to enjoy a little schadenfreude. But banking failures quickly spread across the Atlantic, and it became painfully clear that Europe was not immune to the impact of the crisis that began in the United States — neither were the European offices of American law firms.
A Massachusetts federal judge sent legal questions raised by a lawsuit, which demands that cigarette maker Philip Morris USA Inc. provide early-stage lung cancer detection, to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, while a similar New York federal case awaits a decision on class certification. The suit’s claims include breach of implied warranty, defective design […]
Sherman & Howard, a Denver firm, has combined with Phoenix-based Mohr, Hackett, Pederson, Blakley & Randolph, adding a ninth office, and has lured six attorneys from litigation boutique Netzorg McKeever Koclanes & Bernhardt. With the additions, Sherman & Howard now has 190 attorneys in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and Missouri.
Clifford Chance has launched a redundancy program in its U.K. headquarters, with the Magic Circle firm potentially set to cut around 70 to 80 lawyers. The consultation, separate from one for support staff, puts nearly one in 10 of the firm’s London lawyers under threat. The firm laid off 20 U.S. litigators last year, citing […]