The famously shy Harry Potter author had to ask for a glass of water to regain her composure when asked to describe what her seven-book series meant to her. “I really don’t want to cry because I’m British. It means setting aside my children and everything,” she said. “These characters meant so much to me […]
Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, a 950-lawyer New York firm, got the job when bankers needed deal- savvy attorneys to help launch a $3 billion sale of shares in Reliance Power Ltd., India’s third-largest utility. As the credit crisis drove first-quarter U.S. mergers and acquisitions down 54 percent to $248.1 billion from $536.3 billion last
“There is not room for more than one Slaughter and May in London,” suggests David Morley, senior partner-elect at Allen & Overy. “It’s a fantastic firm, but they’re quite a bit smaller than us now. That brings its own challenges: they don’t do the same volume of deals, they don’t appear at the top of
Attorney fees of more than $412 million were awarded Monday to plaintiffs lawyers from more than 70 firms for their work on the massive fen-phen diet-drug litigation, marking the beginning of the end of the “super-mega-fund” class action. In a 125-page opinion in In re Diet Drugs, Chief U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III said
London’s police force is considering whether to investigate former royal butler Paul Burrell for alleged perjury, officials confirmed Wednesday. Although the judge who led a six-month inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed decided against asking for a police investigation of Burrell, the force said an unidentified person had filed a complaint.
By the time most law students have finished the first year of law school, they’ve had the responses “yes” and “no” surgically excised from their thoughts and replaced by the signature American legalism–“it depends.” And it does. Any attorney worth his salt knows a client’s fate frequently depends on the location of the courthouse deciding
Princess Diana was unlawfully killed due to the “gross negligence” of driver Henri Paul and the paparazzi, an inquest jury has found. The jury reached the same verdict for her companion Dodi Al Fayed. The jury also specified that Mr Paul’s drink-driving and a lack of seatbelts contributed to their deaths. Mr Al Fayed’s father
The costs from the “boom-boom room” culture at Smith Barney are really starting to add up. After settling a sexual discrimination lawsuit in 1997, the Citigroup unit has agreed to settle again. This time it’s ponying up $33 million to settle claims from some 2,500 current and former female brokers that the company discriminated against
A New York state judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought against Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld by a legal recruiter who claimed the law firm stiffed him on a partner placement commission. In a suit filed in October 2006, New York headhunter Eric Sivin of Sivin-Tobin Associates claimed he was entitled to a
Noting that the deals market has experienced “something of a ‘death rattle,’” MergerMarket reports that the volume of global M&A work has dropped substantially at the largest global firms. Data released Thursday shows that U.K. and U.S. firms touched a third fewer M&A deals in the first quarter of 2008 than a year earlier. At
