KPMG LLP will pay about $450 million and open up its operations to independent review as part of a deal with federal prosecutors to avoid a criminal indictment that could have sent the nation’s fourth-largest accounting firm into a death spiral, according to sources familiar with the pact. The deal, struck with the U.S. attorney […]

ET Merck & Co. will consider settling a limited number of lawsuits over its withdrawn painkiller Vioxx, a spokesman said Friday. The drug’s link to heart attacks and strokes has spawned thousands of lawsuits and a $253 million jury verdict in Texas. As recently as Wednesday, company lawyers were still saying they planned to fight

The law of the jungle has permeated barristers’ chambers and solicitors’ offices, if shocking tales of sexual shenanigans are to be believed. The casting couch, once the bane of the film world, is now the standard furniture of the legal profession, according to a young City lawyer who has written an explicit novel about life

California sued GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and 37 other pharmaceutical companies as part of a lawsuit accusing drugmakers of defrauding the state’s $34 billion Medi-Cal program by inflating prescription prices. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who sued Abbott Laboratories in 2003, added the other companies in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston

Linklaters is the most productive of London’s 20 largest law firms, generating 24 percent more in fees per employee than bigger competitor Clifford Chance LLP, a Bloomberg survey found. The world’s second-largest law firm had revenue per employee of 168,763 pounds ($304,000) in fiscal 2005, about 32,000 pounds more than Clifford Chance and 20,000 pounds

Anheuser-Busch Cos Inc. said on Wednesday it agreed to pay $120 million to settle lawsuits brought by the family of former Major League Baseball star Roger Maris. The brewer said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it would take a pretax charge of $105 million in the third quarter. The

Los Angeles County prosecutors today filed five felony charges of welfare fraud and perjury against the mother of Michael Jackson’s teenage accuser, the woman whose credibility was at the center of the pop star’s acquittal on child molestation charges. Prosecutors allege that Janet Arvizo received more than $18,000 in welfare benefits illegally by failing to

A host of UK law firms are preparing to fight pharmaceutical giant Merck over its controversial painkiller Vioxx, following Friday’s US ruling against the company. Several firms, including Alexander Harris, Freethcartwright, Hugh James and Liverpool firm MSB Solicitors, are taking cases to the US on behalf of patients and families who have suffered cardiovascular diseases

The public’s attitude to the world’s leading drug companies has always been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand they expect “Big Pharma” to deliver ever more effective cures for the ills that beset them; on the other they decry the vast profits that the industry makes as in some way exploitative. On Friday August 19th

Partners at the law firm have voted to disband the legal network, founded by Frederic Rene Coudert in New York in 1853. “After exploring various options, the partners of Coudert have authorized the firm to enter into combinations of offices and practice groups with other firms to reflect the strengths of the firm,” Coudert management