Law Firms

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, leading a broad probe into insurance industry fraud and price-fixing, said Friday he intends to pursue criminal charges against executives as high as possible up the corporate ladder. Spitzer in an October lawsuit accused Marsh & McLennan & Cos., the world’s largest insurance broker, of rigging bids for insurance […]

Keker & Van Nest, a 49-lawyer firm based in San Francisco, won The American Lawyer’s first Litigation Boutique of the Year contest. Keker & Van Nest was cited for a series of litigation successes, including major cases in intellectual property, legal malpractice, and white-collar defense. In his report on the firm, senior reporter Paul Braverman

Lynne Stewart, an outspoken lawyer known for aggressively defending a long list of unpopular clients, has been convicted by a federal jury in Manhattan of aiding Islamic terrorism by smuggling messages out of jail from a terrorist client. . Stewart was convicted Thursday on all five counts of providing material aid to terrorism and of

A tiny upstart in the cigarette business threatens to topple a comfortable cartel engineered by big tobacco companies and their strange bedfellows, the state attorneys general. Big tobacco was supposed to come under harsh punishment for decades of deception when it acceded to a tort settlement seven years ago. Philip Morris, R.J.Reynolds, Lorillard and Brown

Franklin C. Brown is in. Once the top lawyer at Rite Aid Corp., Brown reported to prison last week to begin serving 10 years for the role he played in accounting fraud that forced the third-largest U.S. pharmacy chain to retroactively reduce earnings by $1.6 billion. And in the next few days, Bernard J. Ebbers

As the number of Vioxx-related cases mounts, Merck (MRK:NYSE – commentary – research) is discovering that some of its insurers don’t want to pay for the company’s defense against the lawsuits. Merck says it will fight the insurers’ efforts to reduce or eliminate coverage. Merck disclosed the insurance battle Friday after markets had closed. It

The Internal Revenue Service has collected more than $3.2 billion in back taxes, interest and penalties from participants in a single tax shelter, including $100 million from one taxpayer and $20 million each from 18 others, the agency said today. The total take for the agency from participants in the shelter is expected to top

Geoffrey Cox QC, who also helped to bring to an end the prosecution of the property tycoon Nicholas van Hoogstraten, was one of 10 barristers who billed a total of £4.6m in legal aid for work on the £60m case, the most costly in British legal history. Last week, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith QC,

Microsoft Corporation said yesterday that it would pay Gateway $150 million over four years to settle the computer maker’s claim that it was harmed by Microsoft’s abuse of its Windows monopoly. Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., said it would take a $123 million pretax charge in the quarter ended March 31 to account

Arthur Andersen, the once-venerable accounting firm indicted, convicted and destroyed after the collapse of Enron, has reached an agreement to pay $65 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit filed against it by investors in WorldCom in the wake of an $11 billion accounting scandal. The terms of the settlement, which requires court approval, are to