A leading City law firm has challenged its rivals to donate hundreds of thousands of pounds that they earn as interest on client accounts to cash-strapped legal aid centres. Allen & Overy, one of the “magic circle” of top five firms, is to give voluntary legal agencies all the extra interest retained from clients’ cash […]
The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider whether the government can withhold federal funds from colleges that bar military recruiters, wading into a dispute over campus free speech rights. The justices will review in their next term beginning in October a ruling allowing law schools to restrict recruiters as a way of protesting the
The potential postponement this week of the first trial against Merck over its withdrawn painkiller Vioxx could be unfavourable for the US drugmaker, as plaintiffs’ attorneys push a stronger case. An Alabama state judge is scheduled to hold a hearing on Tuesday on whether to postpone the trial originally scheduled for May 23. Both Merck
In his 39 years as a corporate lawyer, Andrew Bogen had seen his share of headstrong CEOs. So he wasn’t especially surprised by the excitable man glaring at him across the room. Craig Conway, the president and chief executive officer of PeopleSoft, Inc., had good reason to be agitated. His company had just been targeted
Whatever prosecutors hoped to achieve by calling Michael Jackson’s former wife to the witness stand, it was the defense lawyers who left happy at the end of the day Thursday. Deborah Rowe, mother of two of Jackson’s children, testified that her former husband was “generous to a fault, a good father, great with kids, puts
The Supreme Court has heard its last argument of the session. Now the question is whether ailing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has heard the last argument of his 33-year career on the high court. Rehnquist, 80, has been the focus of retirement speculation since disclosing in October that he had thyroid cancer. He defied
The deal market has returned, as big as Bill Clinton’s fabled appetites. Not since 2000, the last year of the Clinton presidency, have the transactional and equity markets been so fat. The bounce isn’t taking the markets back to the frothy levels of the late 1990s, but will certainly help inflate the revenues of dealmaking
New York State’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, filed a lawsuit against an Internet marketing company today, saying Intermix Media Inc. is the source of secretly installed spyware that has illegally sent pop-up advertisements and other intrusions to millions of computer users. Mr. Spitzer said the Los Angeles-based company failed to properly inform people that along
The federal government had a hard time three years ago obtaining a conviction of Arthur Andersen for having shredded its Enron documents as the energy company, its major client, was imploding. A jury in Houston took 10 days and declared itself deadlocked before convicting the accounting firm of a single criminal count of witness tampering.
A note taped to a Moscow courthouse door was all that awaited the hundreds of family, friends, lawyers, journalists and human rights activists who arrived on Wednesday expecting to hear the verdict in the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man. The long-awaited judgment had been postponed to May 16, the note said without
