Law Firms

British Airways has formally admitted in a US court that it colluded with its rivals to fix the price of fuel surcharges, opening the door to possible criminal prosecution of staff implicated in the scandal as well as civil litigation. BA, along with Korean Air Lines, have been fined around £150m each by US authorities

Johnny Ray Conner was put to death by lethal injection Wednesday. The 32-year-old man was condemned in 1999 for the fatal shooting of a convenience store owner in Houston during a robbery. In his last statement to witnesses, Conner apologized for his actions, but denounced his execution as “unjust.” He was the 21st condemned inmate

Bruce Masterson, the chief operating officer of Socrates Media, asked his outside counsel to customize a residential lease for all 50 U.S. states in 2003. The firm’s estimate: about $400,000. He rejected that price tag and hired QuisLex, in Hyderabad, India, which did it for $45,000. “It was good quality,” said Masterson, whose Chicago-based company

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the corruption conviction of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, raising the possibility that the 73-year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee will have to begin serving a 6 1/2-year prison sentence. Ryan, promoted for years for a Nobel because of his opposition to capital punishment, has been free on bond

Clifford Chance has been struck by what is thought to be the first discrimination claim against a law firm on the grounds of sexual orientation. Former competition partner Michael Bryceland hit the magic circle firm in November with the claim, which has now been settled for an undisclosed amount. The claim never made it to

When the results of our sixth annual Who Represents America’s Biggest Companies survey came in this summer, many of the same names landed on top. Take the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. In 2005 its most-used corporate transaction firm was Fenwick & West. In 2006? Fenwick & West was on their list

Perhaps the most closely watched figure in European legal circles this summer has been Bo Vesterdorf, the Danish judge who heads Europe’s top appeals court, with antitrust lawyers hanging on his every public utterance. The object of their interest is not the lanky multilingual jurist himself, but rather how the Court of First Instance he

Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said. Administration officials acknowledged