The first barrister to be paid more than £1m in one year from legal aid was named yesterday in a government report which showed that the top 12 lawyers in the field earn more than £600,000 from taxpayers. Top of the list was James Sturman QC, who acted for Jose Mourinho in the Ashley Cole […]

DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary and Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe have drawn up battle lines in China as the rival firms fight for control of Coudert Brothers’ esteemed Beijing practice. DLA Piper has swooped for the majority of the lawyers in Coudert’s Beijing office, despite the fact that Orrick had paid Coudert’s New York management

Ruling in a case that exposed the behind-the-scenes animosity between two high-tech titans, a state judge cleared the way Tuesday for a former Microsoft Corp. executive to perform some of the tasks rival Google Inc. had hired him to do. King County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez is still barring Kai-Fu Lee from doing work

U.S. Chief Justice nominee John Roberts, his record on civil rights and women’s rights challenged by Democrats, vowed at the start of his Senate confirmation hearing on Monday to ensure that the Supreme Court protects all Americans. “I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment,” Roberts, President George W. Bush’s conservative nominee to

At his confirmation hearings this week, Judge John G. Roberts Jr. will be asked to respond to questions about documents he wrote as a young government lawyer. The questions are sure to be sharp, but at least he can take solace in the fact that his mentor, and the man whom he seeks to replace,

It was always going to be an intense week for John Roberts. But it suddenly grew more so. On September 6th, he was due to be grilled by the Senate to see if he would make an adequate Supreme Court justice, having been nominated two months ago to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, who is retiring.

A Manhattan judge has ruled that a law firm accused of legal malpractice over advice it gave clients on mutual fund “late trading” can seek discovery from two other law firms, one of which is now representing the same clients in ongoing government investigations of late trading. Supreme Court Justice Rolando Acosta ordered LeBoeuf, Lamb,

Microsoft EUMicrosoft has launched a legal challenge to protect itself from an order by the European Commission to make valuable information about the group’s flagship Windows operating system available to rivals in the open-source community. The move comes is the latest twist in the long anti-trust battle between the Commission and the US software group

According to documents presented in a legal tussle between Internet rivals Microsoft and Google, Ballmer vowed to “kill” Google in an obscenity-laden tirade last November. Sworn evidence from a former Microsoft engineer, Mark Lucovsky, claimed Ballmer picked up his chair and hurled it across his office, before saying of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt: “I’m going

President Bush moved quickly yesterday to fill the vacancy left by the death of William Rehnquist, nominating John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Mr Roberts, an appeals court judge, had been named to take the seat on the court vacated by Sandra Day O’Connor, who announced her retirement in July.