Tuesday, April 24, 2001
Thanks For Nothing: Silicon Valley Boutiques That Gave Us the Latest Associate Salary Tsunami Hit By Declining Revenues and Shrinking Investment Markets
Renee Deger - The Recorder - April 24, 2001
By all accounts, this will be the worst year ever for Silicon Valley's two leading corporate boutiques. The bread and butter of Venture Law Group and Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian -- venture capital financing and tech startups -- has all but disappeared. And partners at both firms are bracing for a decline in revenues of as much as 10 percent. But the Menlo Park, Calif., boutiques aren't dying nearly as fast as their Silicon Valley competitors would like. The firms say they are surviving on a leaner diet of mergers and acquisitions activity and general corporate work for existing clients -- mostly small and private companies. Both also have a few big-name publicly traded clients that still need them to maneuver the economic downturn.
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California Study: Punitive Damages Hit $6B in 1990s
Kevin Livingston - The Recorder - April 24, 2001
Punitive damage awards increased dramatically in California in the last 10 years, totaling as much as $6.4 billion during the 1990s. That's according to a study released Friday by the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law's Capital Center for Government Law & Policy. And according to the study's findings, punitive damage awards rose from an average of $5.6 million per case at the beginning of the 1990s to $19.3 million in the second half of the decade. The study also reveals that over the last 10 years punitive damages accounted for 88.4 percent of the total damages awarded to plaintiffs. On average, those damages were 7.6 times greater than the total amount for compensatory damages, and juries awarded much higher verdicts than did judges -- an average of $15.5 million per case compared with $930,000.
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The Big-Verdict Myth - Massive jury awards just aren't what they're cracked up to be
John Council - Texas Lawyer - April 24, 2001
They make headlines. They presumably make some lawyers and their clients very rich. But what happens to mega-jury verdicts after the lawyers and the litigants walk away from the courtroom? Texas Lawyer examined 10 of the largest jury verdicts awarded in the state during 1997 and 1998 to find out what became of them. And we discovered that most massive jury awards in Texas during those years -- ranging from $171 million to $22 million in the cases we looked at -- tended to fade when faced with a cold, hard examination by an appellate court.
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Two Tire Companies Punctured by Juries
Margaret Cronin Fisk - The National Law Journal - April 24, 2001
The bad publicity over the failures of Firestone tires may be affecting actions against other tiremakers. On two successive days in April, Cooper Tire and Rubber Co. was hit with a $9.7 million verdict in Texas and Continental General Tire was hammered with a $55.32 million jury award in California, providing the latest indications that this is not the best time to be a tire company. Lawsuits claiming failures in tires have become "the tort du jour."
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Six Firms Split $625 Million in Fees for New York's Share of Big Tobacco Case
Daniel Wise - New York Law Journal - April 24, 2001
An arbitration panel has awarded $625 million in attorneys' fees to the six firms that were hired by New York state to sue the tobacco industry, say sources close to the arbitration report. The fee award is for the work the six firms did in securing $25 billion as New York state's share of the historic $208 billion pact reached between 46 states and the tobacco industry in 1998.
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Monday, April 23, 2001
Network of Trial Law Firms Daily Log Makes The Top Ten List
Ellis Mirsky - Trial.com - April 22, 2001
This "Daily Log," which alerts our member firms to developments in the business of law, has been recognized as no. 2 of the top 10 "Blogs of Note" by Blogger.com. (No. 1 is a Harry Potter blog -- go figure.) Blogger.com is a means of publishing content on the web using a remote server to load, edit and otherwise manage a "diary" of information. We use these blogs for our Daily Log and also to post available inhouse counsel jobs.
Sunday, April 22, 2001
Top US lawyer seeks mobile-phone cancer cash
Linda Harrison - The Register - April 20, 2001
The US lawyer famed for wrangling billions of dollars in damages out of the tobacco industry has started legal action against a stack of mobile phone companies. Peter Angelos yesterday filed class-action lawsuits in state courts in Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia, The Washington Post reports. They accuse major mobile phone companies, both handset makers and telephone network providers, of knowingly selling dangerous products.
They also allege links between mobile phone use and a higher risk of health problems, such as brain damage or genetic irregularities.
The suits are not trying to get cash as compensation for specific illnesses. Instead, one of them is aimed at people who bought headsets to try and limit the amount of radiation seeping into their brains from phones - and who want reimbursing for the costs. The other is for people who have not bought handsets, but who want the phone companies to provide them.
They also want unspecified punitive damages.
The action attacks studies on the effect of mobile phone use on health - stating they are inadequate and incomplete, while accusing companies of not revealing damaging findings from their research.
The 25 companies targeted in the action include Verizon, Sprint PCS, Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson.
The mobile phone health debate has stirred up a string of lawsuits against the industry, but none have yet made it to court. Users have complained about the devices causing anything from cancer to diarrhoea, but the mobile phone companies have always maintained mobiles are not dangerous to health.
The Angelos case is different: the suits are not trying to get damages for people made ill by the devices - it has never been proved that phones cause cancer or other diseases. They are merely after cash for people trying to protect their health until studies reveal one way or the other whether mobiles are dangerous.
It would almost be like smokers 50 years ago trying to get tobacco companies to pay to put filters on all cigarettes, just in case the products turned out to be dangerous.
Seventy-one-year-old Baltimore lawyer Angelos has made a fortune during his lifetime from public health cases. He has brought titans in both the asbestos and tobacco industries to their knees -- and netted a $4 billion settlement for the state of Maryland from the latter. His fees at the time were 25 per cent of the winnings.
Moore Names Lisa M. Palumbo Senior Vice President, General Counsel And Corporate Secretary
e-News Services - Wednesday, April 18, 2001
Robert G. Burton, President and Chief Executive Officer of Moore Corporation Limited (TSE, NYSE: MCL) announced today the appointment of Lisa M. Palumbo as Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary.
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Litigation Intelligence Over the Net - Docket information is key to keeping current, lowering stress
Jehanne McIntyre Edwards - The Connecticut Law Tribune - April 23, 2001
Court dockets, on the surface, are merely official records of cases but, below the surface, the information they contain is far deeper. For an attorney, the docket may be the single most overlooked research, case management, and even business development resource available. The docket is a constant source of litigation management anxiety. An attorney responsible for overseeing a large number of active cases, handled by dozens of partners and associates, must be confident that not a single filing deadline inadvertently passes. For the managing attorney, his or her best weapon and defense may well be access to court dockets. Technology advances have made it possible now to track docket activity in federal, state and local courts and to automatically deliver to an attorney's desktop each day new activity on the dockets of the firm's cases; new cases involving the firm's clients and prospective clients; and new cases involving attorneys, firms, judges or subjects the attorney wants to track.
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Retrieval is Easy, Destruction is Hard - The lesson of Olly North and Fawn Hall: Retrieval is easy
Joel Rothman - Miami Daily Business Review - April 23, 2001
When a computer deletes a file from a disk drive, the data are not destroyed. The file becomes invisible, but the file, all the data on it and the information the computer has about that file, continue to be stored on the disk drive. Expert data recovery can often identify details about the creation, revision and deletion of data, and might even reveal that crucial evidence was destroyed in order to prevent its production in litigation. In cases where it is discovered that data has been deleted, an inspection by an expert in data recovery is critical.
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Wednesday, April 18, 2001
Fight Over Legal Bill Auditing Comes to Quiet End
Janet Conley - The National Law Journal - April 18, 2001
In a quiet end to a bitter fight, some of the country's biggest insurance carriers have stopped sending their lawyers' bills out to be picked over and whittled down by third-party auditors. They're finding that the use of outside auditors was disastrous to their relationship with outside counsel.
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Tuesday, April 10, 2001
Litigation Strategy of Suing Less Than All Possible Defendants - Suing just 2 paint firms helps case, lawyers say. Attorney for industry calls Milwaukee's lawsuit a waste of money
Tom Kertscher - Journal Sentinel - Last Updated: April 9, 2001
By suing only two manufacturers of lead paint, not the many companies that sold the product here, the City of Milwaukee has simplified its potentially groundbreaking case without giving up the chance for maximum damages if it succeeds, several lawyers said Monday. An attorney for one of the paint manufacturers, however, said the industry has prevailed in roughly 50 such lawsuits, saying of the Milwaukee case, "It's a waste of money, theirs and ours."
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A Chilly Season for Associates
law.com - April 10, 2001
In a move almost certainly spawned by the economy's downturn, a San Francisco-based firm is revising its compensation structure to eliminate lock-step base pay for associates. And more and more firms are dusting off stringent review standards to justify "performance-based cuts" -- or layoffs. The climate at firms across the country has associates bracing for a cruel summer.
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Informal Discovery Costly - Employee's counsel sanctioned $94,718
Darryl Van Duch - The National Law Journal - April 10, 2001
A national debate over whether lawyers suing an employer should be able to conduct ex parte interviews with employees of a corporate defendant has triggered real-life consequences in a Massachusetts gender-discrimination suit. In a ruling on March 20, Superior Court Justice John C. Cratsley ordered Boston's Messing & Rudavsky to pay Harvard University $94,718, the amount in legal fees it ostensibly took the defending party to assert its motion for sanctions.
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Monday, April 09, 2001
ICANN Has Hands Full Adding New Domains
Tamara Loomis - New York Law Journal - April 9, 2001
The long-awaited November announcement by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, that it had finally approved seven new top-level domains was supposed to be a good thing. The addition of ".aero," ".biz," ".coop," ".info," ".museum," ".name," and ".pro," which was expected to be operational later this year, would alleviate Internet traffic on the overburdened ".com," ".net" and ".org" domains. But for some, the prospect that they may soon be able to register ".biz" domain names is somewhat less than enticing. A small but growing number of businesses participate in little-known alternative "root" systems to the one controlled by ICANN. A root system steers you to a Web site according to the name you type in, much like the telephone company directs your calls. ICANN, which the Department of Commerce created in November 1998 to oversee the Internet's domain name system, controls the root systems that supports the well-known ".com," ".net" and ".org" domains. The alternative root systems support over 100 other domains, such as ".god," ".earth" and Gallagos' ".biz." If ICANN goes forward with its plan, Web users could type in the same domain name ending in ".biz" and go to different Web sites, depending on whether the computer is configured to use the ICANN-approved server or an alternate.
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Emerging Litigation: Health care lawyers say two recent cases are a bad omen
Darryl Van Duch - The National Law Journal - April 9, 2001
After an unexpected renewal of hostilities between the U.S. Department of Justice and two of the nation's leading hospital chains, corporate health care lawyers are bracing for a possible new wave of costly health care fraud litigation. The latest government prosecutions draw attention to the controversial "Stark Physician Self-referral" law first enacted in 1989 as part of the Social Security Act. The law, subsequently amended in part and known as Stark I and Stark II, prohibits health care providers from billing the government for services given to patients who have been referred by doctors with a financial stake in the provider, such as a hospital. Unlike the closely related federal Anti-Kickback Act, the Stark laws so far have only been used in civil, not criminal, prosecutions. Still, legal experts say, both anti-fraud statutes can be enforced by government lawyers in the same lawsuit. And, now, it's feared, that's what is going to happen with increasing frequency.
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Bristol-Myers sued by consumer group for keeping generic BuSpar out of market
Interactive Investor International - April 9, 2001
A lawsuit has been filed against Bristol-Myers Squibb Co by the consumer group the Prescription Access Litigation project (PAL), charging that Bristol-Myers kept generic BuSpar out of the market by filing false secondary patents, PAL said. PAL said it filed a lawsuit against Bristol-Myers Friday for employing "illegal tactics to artificially maintain a monopoly on the manufacturing, distribution and sales of BuSpar, a widely-prescribed anti-anxiety drug." The complaint charges that Bristol-Myers Squibb acted illegally to lock generic competitors out of the BuSpar market, preventing a more affordable version of BuSpar from coming to the market.
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Milwaukee to file lead lawsuit today - 2 paint companies targeted in new strategy
Greg J. Borowski - Journal Sentinel - April 8, 2001
Milwaukee will join a growing legal battle against the paint industry today, with a lawsuit that would force the cleanup of more than 40,000 central city homes where children are at risk for lead poisoning. But while recent lawsuits by other cities and states targeted virtually every major company that has sold lead-based paint, Milwaukee's lawsuit will list only two - Houston-based NL Industries and Madison-based Mautz Paint. More defendants could be added.
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Friday, April 06, 2001
Pharmacies' Customers Win Class Status
Michael A. Riccardi - New York Law Journal - April 2, 2001
A Manhattan Supreme Court judge certified a statewide class action for plaintiffs whose medical and prescription records were transferred from independent drug stores to the national chain CVS. The class action will encompass the claims of persons who were customers of independent drug stores that sold medical and prescription information to the CVS chain from 1993 through 1999.
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Richards & O'Neil, Boston's Bingham Dana to Merge
Bruce Balestier - New York Law Journal - April 4, 2001
Winnowing by one the steadily dwindling ranks of mid-size firms in Manhattan, the 75-lawyer general practice firm Richards & O'Neil said that it will merge with fast-growing Bingham Dana of Boston. The merger, which takes effect May 1, will create a firm of about 500 lawyers and more than double the size of Bingham Dana's New York branch, to 125 attorneys.
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NYPIRG Seeks Computer Files on Lead Paint Testing
John Caher - New York Law Journal - April 5, 2001
The New York Public Interest Research Group is asking a judge in Albany to force the State Health Department to disclose all of its non-confidential childhood lead poisoning test records -- a request which, if successful, could release a treasure trove of information that could prove useful in the prosecution or defense of lead paint cases.
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After Remand, Pennsylvania Supremes Affirm Landmark HMO Decision - Doctors' 'mixed decisions' are properly redressed with state, not federal law
Ruth Bryna Cohen - The Legal Intelligencer - April 5, 2001
In a landmark decision for the health law community, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed its 1998 decision in Pappas v. Asbel, holding that a state law medical negligence claim was not pre-empted by ERISA. The decision followed the dictates of Pegram v. Hendrich, a 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision which triggered the remand of Pappas back to Pennsylvania's highest court.
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