Law Firms

Membership in a megafirm isn’t the only ticket to living high on the hog. The partners in The Am Law 200’s Second Hundred — firms number 101 to 200 on the American Lawyer’s list of the nation’s highest-grossing firms — are doing just fine, despite the fact that their average size is just 260 lawyers. […]

No need to brace yourself — yet — for the reappearance of the hostile-takeover sharpies of the 1980s or even the foosball-and-flip-flop gazillionaires of the late-’90s tech boom, but recently law firms have been gleefully watching their profits climb of late to levels not seen in years. Plumped up by healthy litigation practices, Sarbanes-Oxley work

One of the country’s top law firms has been fined almost £40,000 for refusing to allow a woman employee to work flexible hours, in a case experts say typifies the failure of some employers to adapt to new family-friendly rights for white-collar staff. The Equal Opportunities Commission said yesterday the case involving Herbert Smith, a

It may be one of the most feared law firms in the country. It prides itself on going after giant corporations on behalf of the little guy. Silicosis is a lung disease you can get from breathing particles from sandblasting. But now a federal judge is accusing the firm of taking part in manufacturing cases

Lovells has unveiled radical plans to help boost profitability after profit per equity partner (PEP) plunged 21 per cent at the City firm in the past financial year. The initiative, launched by Lovells managing partner David Harris, includes the introduction of a new financial system to measure the profitability of matters and clients or client

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

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s departure from the high court heats up the judicial nominations battle, while also creating a political bind — and an opportunity — for President Bush and a focal point for interest groups. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor hated being called the Court’s swing vote. And she never thought

Microsoft yesterday agreed to pay $775m to settle a long-running dispute with IBM which had accused it of predatory business practices. The settlement is part of Microsoft’s continuing efforts to clear away the litigation that has dogged it for much of the past 10 years. In the past couple of years the company has paid

The arrest Tuesday of Robert Johnson, the former Newsday publisher and a New York State regent, was one of hundreds so far growing out of a 2 1/2-year-old federal investigation that targets the financing of child pornography Web sites, according to sources familiar with the case. The New Jersey-based probe by U.S. Immigration and Customs

In the fast-growing, highly lucrative arena of real estate investment trusts, competition among law firms for established REIT practices is cutthroat — and turnabout is fair play. Six weeks after its REIT practice was decimated by the departure of a 10-lawyer team from its Raleigh office, Alston & Bird early this month attempted to raid