After three months of talks, Boston-based Ropes & Gray and New York intellectual property firm Fish & Neave have decided to join forces. The leaders of the two firms said Monday that they expect to merge around the end of the year. While 150-lawyer Fish & Neave will be absorbed into the 580-attorney Ropes & […]
John G. Rowland, who stepped down as Connecticut’s governor last summer in the face of impeachment, pleaded guilty today to a single federal charge of criminal conspiracy. In the plea agreement, Mr. Rowland admitted to defrauding the Internal Revenue Service by failing to report gratuities, and to defrauding the people of Connecticut by failing to
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s decision to slash White & Case’s legal fee in a bankruptcy-related case from $5.5 million to $1.8 million, criticizing the firm’s fees as excessive. “White & Case has not persuaded us that it is entitled to so much more than the attorneys on
Both are former federal prosecutors, formidable in their courtrooms. They are also fast friends, contemporaries who rose through the legal ranks in New York City during the gritty 1970’s and the more prosperous 1980’s. And, for the next few months, Denise L. Cote, 58, and Barbara S. Jones, 57, United States District Court judges in
McDonalds agreed yesterday to pay $8.5 million to settle two lawsuits accusing it of misleading consumers about the levels of trans fat in its food. McDonald’s will pay $7 million to the American Heart Association to finance a campaign educating consumers about trans fats, which are considered major contributors to heart disease. In October 2003,
A U.S. judge on Thursday dismissed Russian oil company YUKOS’ U.S. bankruptcy case, saying the issue belonged in a forum that included the participation of the Russian government The ruling, which came just hours after a summit between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Bratislava, ends two months of legal maneuvering by YUKOS
Aon Corp. agreed to pay $190 million to settle charges by three states that it accepted hundreds of millions of dollars of improper payments in exchange for steering clients toward favored insurance companies, the Illinois attorney general said on Friday. The world’s second-largest insurance broker, based in Chicago, settled with Illinois, New York and Connecticut,
MOSCOW – A jailed lawyer for the embattled Yukos oil company has come off a hunger strike after suffering health problems, her lawyer said Tuesday. Svetlana Bakhmina, who is charged in connection with a 6-year-old case involving alleged asset-stripping at a Yukos subsidiary, began a hunger strike March 3 to protest after investigators refused to
Losing still more legal appeals, Terri Schiavo’s father warned Friday that his severely brain-damaged daughter was “down to her last hours” as she entered her second week without the feeding tube that had sustained her life for 15 years. Doctors have said she would probably die within a week or two of the feeding tube
Assets held in individual retirement accounts are not savings that can be seized by creditors in bankruptcy proceedings, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court said Monday. The IRAs belonging to Richard and Betty Jo Rousey are akin to deferred wages that were intended to be used for retirement and qualify as a shielded asset from Chapter
