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

1990 Terri Schiavo suffers brain damage during cardiac arrest, a result of a potassium imbalance that may have been caused by her suspected bulimia. She emerges from her coma but does not regain consciousness. A Florida court appoints her husband Michael guardian.•1992 Michael sues Terri’s doctor and in November wins $750,000 for her and $300,000

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