Law Firms

There were women in pearls, men in seersucker — enough well-heeled Mississippians to conjure up a charity auction or summer fete. They were crowded Friday into a small wood-paneled federal courtroom behind a long line of sober, dark-suited attorneys to watch Richard F. “Dickie” Scruggs, a legendary plaintiffs’ attorney, receive a five-year prison sentence after […]

The grueling legal and environmental odyssey for Alaska fishermen and the Minneapolis law firm of Faegre & Benson came to a climactic conclusion Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court sliced punitive damages from the 1979 Exxon Valdez oil spill to $507 million — a tenth of what a jury awarded 14 years ago. Under Wednesday’s

Conrad Black has lost an appeal of fraud and obstruction of justice convictions and will have to serve out his sentence in a Florida prison for what the court described as a “misuse” of his position as Hollinger’s chief executive “for private gain.” The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeal in Chicago affirmed the convictions Wednesday,

Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday. The blistering report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general, is the first in what

As Thursday brought the first criminal indictments tied to the subprime mortgage crisis, attention inevitably has swung to the prosecutors who are leading the charge. In the cases of Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers, their chief adversary is Benton J. Campbell, the United States attorney for the Eastern

Senior Pentagon lawyers played a more active role than previously known in developing the aggressive interrogation techniques approved for use in 2002 at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to officials familiar with a Senate investigation. Investigators with the Senate Armed Services Committee have found documents from July 2002 showing that Pentagon lawyers