Law Firms

Justice Department officials intend to release more secret legal memos that underpinned the Bush administration’s approach to national security issues, responding to pressure from Democratic lawmakers and interest groups that have sued for access to the sensitive materials, sources said yesterday. At his January confirmation hearing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said he would […]

Enforcement lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission have recently been dressed down by Congress, blamed for major investment bank failures and publicly criticized for missing the alleged frauds of financiers Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford. And still, they’re in the best mood they’ve been in for years. “There’s a sense of the lifting

As the dismal economy has continued on a downward spiral this month, so has the legal industry, with February layoffs exceeding January’s by a considerable margin. January’s carnage, in which renowned law firms laid off more than 1,500 attorneys and staff at last count, has been followed by further freefall in February in which more

There’s at least one law office that still has more transactional work than it can handle. Since October, lawyers at the Treasury Department’s Office of General Counsel have completed $306 billion worth of deal work stemming from the Troubled Assets Relief Program. In a few short months, they’ve closed 418 separate transactions with financial institutions

The ‘AboveTheLaw’ blog has been doing the tallying, but the wreckage from the recession is taking its heaviest toll ever among the Big Law firms. DLA Piper announced it was laying off 80 lawyers and 100 staff members in the U.S. Goodwin Procter announced it was cutting 36 lawyers and 38 staff members Dechert cut

When social networking site Facebook settled a lawsuit with ConnectU, a social networking site Facebook creator Mark Zuckerburg worked on, the terms of the deal were supposed to stay secret. But thanks to one law firm’s overzealous PR department, the $65 million cat is out of the bag. If the law firm of Quinn Emanuel,

At law firm Bickel & Brewer, even the mailroom clerks wear suits and ties. Until recently, that might have been considered extreme. But now, power dressing is coming back in style, and the old-school law firm has a new relevance. As law-firm layoffs mount, fear of unemployment appears to be speeding up the resurgence of