Lawyer - News

Schering-Plough Corp. faces a spate of federal court litigation over promotion of its drugs for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Eight putative class action suits are pending with U.S. District Judge Stanley Chesler in Newark, N.J., consolidated by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Schering's lawyer, Joan McPhee of Ropes & Gray, said the company will defend what it considers a free-speech right to discuss off-label uses with doctors. No comments

Attorneys who pursued a class action against Microsoft could see a record payday if the settlement gets final approval today. Attorneys Roxanne Conlin and Richard Hagstrom are seeking $75 million in fees and costs, an amount believed by some legal experts to be a record in Iowa. At a hearing last week, rulings published by Judge Richard Sankovitz suggest that Microsoft continues to question some of the timekeeping entries submitted by Hagstrom and his legal team. No comments

Convicted cocaine dealer Jose Rodriguez thought he was in the clear after the 2nd Circuit ordered that his habeas petition be granted because the trial judge had restricted his family's access to his trial. But the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the 2nd Circuit's ruling and instructed it to reconsider in light of its decision in . On Wednesday, the circuit said it could no longer rely on dicta in U.S. Supreme Court decisions in reviewing a habeas case -- and denied Rodriguez' petition. No comments

For the first time in nearly a decade, the executive branch this past spring opened a register to applications for administrative law judge positions. Within three days of posting the announcement on the government jobs Web site, the opening closed, having drawn a targeted 1,250 applicants. Was it long pent-up demand or something not quite proper that prompted the application onslaught? The latter, charges the Association of Administrative Law Judges in a federal lawsuit filed this summer. No comments

Recent headlines highlight the vanishing line between professional and private e-mail accounts. Attorneys are likely to face an increasing number of requests for access to any business-related e-mail on the employee's home computer and online e-mail account. No comments

If you are looking for the future of legal scholarship, chances are that you may find it not in a treatise or the traditional law review but in a different form, profoundly influenced by the blogosphere. Law-related blogs are proliferating on the Internet, says University of Chicago law librarian Margaret Schilt, and a significant number of them are hosted by law professors. But, Schilt asks, does blogging contribute to the scholarship, teaching and service asked of legal academics? No comments

A product liability suit against Rexall Sundown involving the death of a man who used its once popular weight-loss product Metab-O-LITE was reinstated Wednesday by a Florida appeals court. Rexall had won dismissal on the grounds that Palm Beach County, Fla., wasn't the proper venue for the lawsuit, but the appellate court said Rexall filed its motion to dismiss months too late and that Palm Beach County was the appropriate venue because the product's manufacture and distribution occurred there. No comments

The Department of Justice said Thursday it is investigating whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lied or otherwise misled Congress in sworn testimony about the Bush administration's domestic terrorist spying program. At last month's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales denied that he tried in 2004, as White House counsel, to push the DOJ into approving the administration's Terrorist Surveillance Program -- despite concerns that it was illegal. No comments

A California appeals court judge had little sympathy for the state of California last week, affirming $307,000 in attorney fees for a woman who had been granted nearly $1.5 million in fees earlier in the case over enforcement of a ballot measure concerning prison inmate wages. Justice Judith McConnell agreed with the trial court that the state has "taken a scorched-earth, drag-your-feet ... approach to the litigation where it has fought tooth and nail to avoid doing what it voluntarily agreed to do." No comments

The former prosecutor who led the now-discredited Duke lacrosse rape case never intentionally tried to mislead the court and believed he gave all DNA test results to defense attorneys, a lawyer for Mike Nifong said Thursday during his criminal contempt trial. Defense attorneys for three falsely accused players had asked that Nifong be punished for initially telling the court he turned over all testing results when he knew, and failed to disclose, that the genetic evidence did not match any of the athletes. No comments