Law Firms

A federal judge found a former attorney for Aaron Patterson in civil contempt Wednesday for staging two tearful walkouts during the former death row inmate’s trial on drug and firearms charges. Defense attorney Demitrus Evans, 37, first stormed out of the courtroom after one of Patterson’s many emotional outbursts in June during his pretrial hearings. […]

America’s new Class Action Fairness Act seeks to curb frivolous class-action lawsuits against companies in areas such as product liability and labour law, mainly by redirecting more of them to federal courts and so denying lawyers scope to “forum-shop” among biddable state courts. But before companies declare victory, they should reflect that the law of

Merck & Co. should have told doctors and consumers “the good, the bad and the ugly” about Vioxx long before pulling it from the market last year, a plaintiff’s attorney said Wednesday in closing arguments in the nation’s first civil trial involving the once-popular painkiller. Mark Lanier, who represents the widow of a Texas man

Four former Wall Street brokers have been indicted for a scheme allowing day traders to eavesdrop on internal communications and profit by trading ahead of large share orders and subsequent price movements, U.S. prosecutors said on Monday. The brokers were accused of securities fraud, conspiracy, and receiving commercial bribes, according to an indictment unsealed in

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