The trial of Bernard Ebbers, the Canadian-born former chief executive of WorldCom Inc., got underway Tuesday in New York. Ebbers, 63, has pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud and conspiracy connected with the company’s $11 billion US accounting scandal. He faces up to 85 years in prison if convicted on the charges. “Bernie Ebbers […]

Iran’s hardline judiciary admitted it had made an administrative error by summoning Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi to a national security court, and said there was no danger she would be arrested. “The prosecutor reviewed the case when he learned it concerned Ebadi, and found some mistakes had been made,” judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimi-Rad

This week, separate trials are scheduled to begin for two of the more prominent names on the government’s list of pinstriped bad boys: Bernard Ebbers, former head of WorldCom, and Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco International. Except for the upcoming trial of former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling, most of the marquee

Whatever reasons Walt Disney thought they had to fire Michael Ovitz, they were not good enough to send him away without $140m in severance, the Delaware chancery court heard on Friday. John Fox, an employment lawyer from California, said none of the former group president’s failings during his brief stint at Disney in the mid-1990s

The U.S. military prison guard convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib said on Saturday he complained repeatedly to superiors about the rough treatment he was forced to mete out to prisoners. Charles Graner, who was found guilty on Friday on 10 charges in the scandal that has badly damaged America’s reputation, said during

Who says class distinctions are dead? This year’s Who’s Who welcomed 135 lawyers to its pages, 115 of whom were silks and just three of whom were solicitors in private practice. In this year’s The Lawyer Hot 100, we’ve tried to be a bit more representative. Of course, we’re slightly hampered by our raw material.

News this week that Peter Cornell, global managing partner of the world’s largest law firm, Clifford Chance, is relocating from London to New York – the two main international legal centres – has shone the spotlight on whether British and American lawyers can merge successfully. They dominate the market. Four of the world’s 10 largest

Some of Enron Corp’s former directors have agreed to a $168 million settlement of a shareholder lawsuit over the collapse of the energy trading company, the lead plaintiff in the case says. The directors will pay more than $13 million of their own money, while insurance proceeds will cover the remaining $155 million, according to

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s decision to slash White & Case’s legal fee in a bankruptcy-related case from $5.5 million to $1.8 million, criticizing the firm’s fees as excessive. “White & Case has not persuaded us that it is entitled to so much more than the attorneys on

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, leading a broad probe into insurance industry fraud and price-fixing, said Friday he intends to pursue criminal charges against executives as high as possible up the corporate ladder. Spitzer in an October lawsuit accused Marsh & McLennan & Cos., the world’s largest insurance broker, of rigging bids for insurance