Law Firms

First Command Financial Planning Inc., a company that sold high-fee mutual funds to military officers, has agreed to pay $12 million to settle regulators’ charges that it used misleading sales material to promote the funds. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Association of Securities Dealers, the brokerage industry’s self-policing organization, announced Wednesday the […]

A defense lawyer for Lynne F. Stewart, a lawyer accused of aiding Egyptian terrorists, told a federal jury today that prosecutors had failed to present any evidence that she knew about a conspiracy among terrorists in Egypt, or even that a conspiracy existed. The lawyer, Michael E. Tigar, asserted that prosecutors had instead engaged in

Bernard Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, was yesterday accused of telling “lie after lie after lie” about the telecommunication firm’s fragile finances to shore up its share price and protect his personal fortune, US federal prosecutors said yesterday. The remarks were part of opening statements in Mr Ebbers’ trial in New York. He

The former finance chief of WorldCom Inc. testified on Tuesday that Bernard Ebbers, as CEO, had pressured him every quarter to meet Wall Street earnings estimates, repeatedly telling him “to hit the numbers.” In his second day of testifying as the prosecution’s star witness against Ebbers, Scott Sullivan recounted a series of conversations with his

A jury Friday ordered the Boston Herald to pay $2.1 million for libeling a Superior Court judge, saying it misquoted him as telling lawyers that a 14-year-old rape victim should “get over it.” In a case closely watched by the media and legal communities, a jury deliberated for more than 20 hours over five days

Dozens of men and women accused of the rape and abuse of children have gone on trial in one of the biggest court cases in France’s legal history. The trial, which involves 66 defendants and is expected to last four months, is taking place in a specially built hall in the town of Angers, western

There is no dispute that there was fraud. There is no dispute that the accounting was questionable. There is no dispute that shareholders lost billions or that the company went bankrupt. But convicting any top executive, like Bernard J. Ebbers, the former WorldCom chief executive, is difficult. The arcana of accounting, compounded by the difficulty

A federal appeals court refused early Wednesday to order the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, denying the latest emergency request by the severely brain-damaged woman’s parents to keep her alive. A panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 2-1 ruling that the parents “failed to demonstrate a substantial case on

When, last Friday, a lawyer acting for Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg, began carting boxes of documents from a branch office of American International Group Inc in Bermuda, he set in motion events that swiftly brought down the legendary chairman of the insurance giant. The next day lawyers acting for AIG found that computer records and tapes

Warren Buffett, the famed American investor, will appear before investigators and regulators on Monday seeking the facts behind a questionable transaction at the heart of a widening inquiry into the insurance business. The suspect transaction was between the world’s largest insurer, American International Group, and General Re, a reinsurance division of Mr Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.