The case, which is expected to last until Christmas, is likely to have a significant impact on the accountancy profession, the role of non-executive directors and Equitable’s policyholders. Vanni Treves, chairman of Equitable Life, is understood to have made an attempt to get the troubled life insurer’s former auditors to enter into talks about settling […]

Italy’s top three firms last year retained their positions as the Continent’s most profitable of the 100 largest firms, with top partners at Bonelli Erede Papalardo earning a staggering £5m. Despite a slow year and a scarcity of big-ticket M&A, Bonelli secured the top spot in the profit table, with average profit per equity partner

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has issued subpoenas to at least two of the nation’s three largest drug distributors in what appears to be a probe into the way the companies buy drugs from each other. AmerisourceBergen Corp., Chesterbrook, Pa., in a filing late Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission said one of

A former security guard at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch told a lurid and graphic story Thursday about seeing the singer sexually abusing a child in the early 1990s, but was attacked by Jackson’s lawyer as making the whole thing up “to get even.” Ralph Chacon was called to the stand in Jackson’s child molestation trial

Holland & Knight’s recent announcement that a partner accused by nine female lawyers of sexual harassment was stepping down from a top position to which he’d just been promoted holds lessons for other law firms, experts on workplace issues say. In March, New York-based managing partner Howell Melton announced that Douglas A. Wright, 44, a

In what would be a highly unusual event, one of L. Dennis Kozlowski’s lawyers could find himself testifying in the retrial of the former chief executive of Tyco International Ltd., his lawyers said Wednesday. Stephen E. Kaufman, Kozlowski’s lead attorney, could be forced to take the stand if David Boies, a prominent lawyer who conducted

The biggest defection from a UK law firm will be announced today with a 45-strong legal team moving from Denton Wilde Sapte. Eleven partners, 18 lawyers, four trainees and 12 support staff from DWS’s media and intellectual property team have switched to DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Carey, the firm that completed a large transatlantic merger

Liquidators to Independent Insurance yesterday said they would sue the collapsed company’s former auditors for a sum thought to be in the region of £300m. Price WaterhouseCoopers liquidators Mark Batten and Dan Schwarzmann said they had served particulars of claim against KPMG and that the claim was based on alleged negligent audit work carried out

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged for the first time that FBI agents used provisions of the Patriot Act during their investigation last year of a Portland attorney who was wrongly jailed for two weeks on suspicion of involvement in the Madrid train bombings. The Patriot Act allows for covert searches of homes, without conventional search

Brooklyn judge who grabbed a Legal Aid lawyer in his courtroom while yelling at him about his handling of a traffic case has been publicly censured by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, which rejected a recommendation to remove him from the bench. The judge, Richard N. Allman, who has served in Brooklyn Criminal Court