Law Firms

Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator who once worked for Hollywood stars, and a prominent lawyer, Terry N. Christensen, were convicted Friday in the wiretapping of the ex-wife of the investor Kirk Kerkorian in a child-support case. Both Mr. Christensen and Mr. Pellicano, 65, were convicted of conspiracy to commit wiretapping in Federal District Court here. […]

If at first you don’t succeed, try, and try again. It’s a maxim that the management at Heller Ehrman has taken to heart over the past year as it has explored merging with one firm after another. A little over two weeks ago, discussions with Baker & McKenzie, the most substantive of Heller’s recent merger

Although he hasn’t practiced law in over 30 years, newly-minted vice presidential nominee Joe Biden remains a favorite son in the legal community. Like all potential VPs, Joe Biden was thoroughly vetted by the Obama campaign, his relationships to lobbyists carefully analyzed. The Am Law Daily did some of its own vetting of the new

Thousands of lawyers blocked roads across Pakistan on Thursday to press the government to reinstate judges purged by former president Pervez Musharraf, as militants attacked police in the northwest, killing 11 people. A bitter disagreement between the country’s two main political parties over the judges led to a split in the ruling coalition this week,

Gary Dubin spent 19½ months in a California federal prison and returned to Hawaii in October 1996 to practice law. The state’s Office of Dis­ciplinary Counsel, in an extremely unusual decision concerning a matter of moral turpitude, determined that a finding of pro­fessional misconduct was “not warranted.” Later, even the U.S. Internal Revenue Service reversed

“Over the course of the summer, leaders at the country’s biggest law firms have come to an unpleasant realization: They’re about to employ more lawyers than they need,” writes the WLJ’s Ashby Jones. The credit-crunch, writes Jones, along with “a strange and rigid hiring process that has been entrenched for a long time,” have conspired

Toymaker Mattel has been awarded multi-million dollar damages in a copyright case against the maker of the popular Bratz dolls, MGA Entertainment. A California jury made the award after a court ruled that the creator of Bratz dolls, Carter Bryant, came up with the idea while he was working for Mattel. The payout is thought

The most widely watched ranking of U.S. law schools may move to stop an increasingly popular practice: schools gaming the system by channeling lower-scoring applicants into part-time programs that don’t count in the rankings. U.S. News & World Report is “seriously” considering reworking its ranking system to crack down on the practice, says Robert Morse,

Solo practitioner Ronald Henry Pierce of Mississippi will have to pay a $1.5 million verdict against him for having an affair with a client’s wife, the Mississippi Supreme Court has ruled. The court affirmed the verdict for intentional infliction of emotional distress, breach of contract and alienation of affection in an Aug. 14 opinion (PDF),

A booking agent for a prostitution ring whose clients included former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer pleaded guilty on Monday to a conspiracy charge relating to prostitution. Tanya Hollander, 36, was one of four people charged with running the Emperors Club VIP, a high-priced prostitution ring broken up this year. She pleaded guilty to a