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 […]

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,

Michael J. Sullivan loved being a district attorney in Brockton. He could look out his office window and see the fruits of prosecuting drug dealers: people walking without fear on the streets of the old mill town, children frolicking on playgrounds. When Sullivan was nominated as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, he worried he wouldn’t find

Behind one of the largest jury awards ever in a Silicon Valley intellectual-property case is a story that has played out like a messy divorce. Late last month, Fremont’s Lexar Media Inc. won $465 million in civil damages from Japanese electronics giant Toshiba Corp. A Superior Court jury in Santa Clara County sided with Lexar’s

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

Lawyers representing Michael Jackson have asked the judge in the singer’s child sex abuse case to declare a mistrial. They say they have evidence that witnesses have discussed their testimony outside the courtroom, in violation of court rules. Earlier on Friday, jurors heard for the first time about previous claims of child abuse against the

Your phone rings. It’s Special Agent Bert Ranta. The FBI is investigating a crime ring involved in widespread identity theft. It has led to millions of dollars of credit card and loan losses for lenders, and havoc in the lives of the 10,000 victims. By identifying links between the victims, the FBI has discovered where

When Johnson Tan rented a 300-square-metre room for Jones Day’s Beijing office two years ago, he worried the space might be too big. Tan, partner at Jones Day’s Beijing office, had reason to worry, as the company faced numerous uncertainties when it first arrived in Beijing. For example, the city was being ravaged by the

The music business should have stuck by Thomas Edison’s technology if it wanted to avoid the threat of piracy. His wax cylinders could record a performance but could not be reproduced; that became possible only with the invention of the flat-disc record some years later. On Tuesday March 29th, America’s Supreme Court began to hear

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s empire is expanding with a high-profile new venture: Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is becoming a partner in a politically connected Texas law firm and will open its Manhattan office in May. The Houston law firm, Bracewell & Patterson, employs several prominent Republicans and former members of the Bush