Lawyer - News

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. No comments

Cooley Godward Kronish is forming a Latin America real estate group to work with clients seeking to invest in or develop real estate in the region, including the Caribbean. Thomas O'Connor, the firm's current chair for the real estate practice, and Mark W. Lipschutz, of counsel at the firm and the chief executive of the real estate company Caribbean Property Group, will co-head the new team. Both lawyers are based in New York. No comments

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the nation's largest public transportation system, has awarded Tishman Speyer Properties the right to develop the city's West Side rail yards. Representing Tishman in the request for proposals process were Fried Frank partners Jonathan Mechanic and Stephen Lefkowitz, along with associates Molly Dunham and Daniel Benavides. Tishman's winning offer of more than $1 billion trumped proposals from heavyweights Vornado Realty Trust and The Durst Organization. No comments

In a ruling of first impression, a Manhattan judge has scratched a request for punitive damages in a bedbug case. But the judge, Acting Supreme Court Justice Judith J. Gische, let go forward the negligence claims of two Maryland tourists for bites they sustained during a two-night stay at the Milford Plaza Hotel, and for which they're seeking $2 million in compensatory damages. Gische found that the plaintiffs had failed "to raise a triable issue of fact whether bedbugs are anything more than a nuisance." No comments

A former partner at Latham & Watkins pleaded guilty Friday to defrauding both clients and his own firm by charging them more than $300,000 in personal or false expenses. In announcing the guilty plea of Samuel A. Fishman, a mergers and acquisition specialist in Latham's New York office from 1993 to 2005, prosecutors noted that the firm had reimbursed its clients hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been fraudulently charged. No comments

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. No comments

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. No comments

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. No comments

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. No comments

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." No comments