Law Firms

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York and the state’s Insurance Department filed a civil lawsuit this afternoon against the insurance giant American International Group and its former top executives, accusing them of manipulating the company’s finances to deceive regulators and investors. The lawsuit, which was filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, said A.I.G.’s […]

The movement of attorneys from huge to smaller law firms is becoming more common, according to some recruiters. As big practices get bigger and pursue hefty clients to match that growth, many attorneys who service smaller clients find their careers at odds with their firms’ strategic plan, he said. In those cases, moving on to

One in 10 of the 100 biggest law firms have indicated they could seek a stock market flotation in the wake of planned rules allowing outside investment in the legal sector. A survey of managing partners at the largest commercial practices has revealed a significant appetite for raising extra capital should ministers carry through the

Reed Smith is in merger talks with Chicago litigation and IP specialist Wildman Harrold in a deal that would create a 1,200-lawyer firm, Legal Week can reveal, in the latest merger bid to hit the consolidating US legal market. Sources at Reed Smith confirmed the talks, which are at an early stage. A successful tie-up

To gain perspective, we ran VPL numbers for the last six years and found that each of the top 15 firms this year have been in the top quintile in every year since 2000. The top isn’t the only place where firms stay in place. We found that over the six years most firms tended

The public’s attitude to the world’s leading drug companies has always been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand they expect “Big Pharma” to deliver ever more effective cures for the ills that beset them; on the other they decry the vast profits that the industry makes as in some way exploitative. On Friday August 19th

William H. Rehnquist, the 16th Chief Justice of the United States and a leader of the court’s conservative bloc for three decades, died Saturday evening at his home in Arlington, a court spokesman announced. Rehnquist, 80, has been undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer since October. His death creates the first vacancy for a chief justice

What would happen to your business if China invaded Taiwan? How would your clients react if America adopted an isolationist foreign policy? Where would your growth come from if globalisation were reversed? It might sound so far-fetched as to be irrelevant, but Clifford Chance, the global law firm, has commissioned one of its biggest strategic

The moment Saddam Hussein appeared, a Shi’ite housewife spat on the screen and then sat gnawing her fingers, seething, as her family crowded around the television. When the judge addressed the ousted president as “Mr. Saddam,” she burst: “The beast Saddam, you mean!” Across the Tigris River in the mostly Sunni Arab district of Azamiyah,

Alex Kozinski, a federal appeals court judge in California, was a little miffed last year when a blog called Underneath Their Robes, a dishy hybrid of People magazine and The Harvard Law Review, failed to list him as a candidate for “male superhottie of the federal judiciary.” So he nominated himself (“discerning females and gay