It began with an e-mail that any in-house counsel could have written: a reminder to colleagues about the company’s document retention policy. “It will be helpful to make sure that we have complied with the policy,” wrote Nancy Temple, a Chicago-based in-house lawyer for the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, in October 2001. The policy called
A federal grand jury is investigating whether Thomas M. Coughlin, a former vice president of Wal-Mart Stores, cheated on an expense account and misused gift cards, a Wal-Mart spokesman said yesterday. Wal-Mart told regulators in a filing that Mr. Coughlin may have improperly appropriated as much as $500,000. Lawyers for Mr. Coughlin have denied the
Medtronic Inc. ended a long-running patent fight on Friday by agreeing to pay $1.35 billion to a Los Angeles doctor who invented much of its spinal-treatment technology. The settlement with Dr. Gary K. Michelson and his company, Karlin Technology Inc., calls for Medtronic to pay $800 million to buy spinal-fusion technology and $550 million to
A judge refused to bring an early end to the corporate fraud trial of Richard Scrushy on Thursday, rejecting defense requests to throw out key charges that the fired HealthSouth Corp. chief directed a huge accounting scheme. The decision by U.S. District Judge Karon Bowdre — who did dismiss one of three other counts accusing
A federal appeals court on Wednesday refused to reconsider a ruling barring the government from seeking $280 billion in past profits from cigarette makers as part of its civil racketeering case against the industry. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dealt another setback to the government’s case by rejecting a request that
Enron Corp.’s once-proud broadband unit was little more than a mishmash of questionable software, accounting tricks and unkept promises, a U.S. prosecutor said as the trial of five former executives got under way on Tuesday. “The mission of Enron Broadband Services (EBS) was to pump up the Enron stock price by telling investors they had
The search began today for a jury that will spend the next couple of months trying to sort out whether Enron executives indulged in lies or mere hype in an attempt to make their Internet business look good. Five men from the company’s once-promising Enron Broadband Systems are accused of 170 counts of conspiracy, wire
While most law schools decry law school rankings for failing to represent the true successes of their institutions, they also recognize that where they end up on the list is crucial to wooing strong applicants, raising funds and getting their graduates into top firms. As a result, some schools are directing resources-or even gaming the
Just as he finds himself sitting in a courtroom, pondering the possibility of prison and fighting the legal battle of his life, Michael Jackson is now also facing an urgent financial crisis that could cause him to lose part of his valuable music publishing business. The onetime King of Pop, whose lavish spending and mounting
Yesterday, the U.S. attorney’s office in New York revealed its indictment of Houston oil trader and Bayoil owner David Bay Chalmers, who, the government alleges, used intermediaries to pay at least $3 million to Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship over the course of the seven-year-long United Nations Oil for Food Program. The program was meant to use
