The European Union on Friday dropped money-laundering and smuggling claims against Philip Morris International in a $1.25bn settlement it claimed could herald similar deals with other tobacco companies. The EU legal team, which is pursuing RJ Reynolds and Japan Tobacco in the US courts, believes the deal with the makers of Marlboro cigarettes is a […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking to overturn 10 patents they claim are too sweeping, the New York Times reported on Monday. The foundation, which includes lawyers, researchers and software experts, takes aim at the patents of several little-known companies, but names two media and entertainment leaders: Clear Channel Communications Inc., the No. 1 U.S.

The high times in America are slowed for the World’s largest law firm. Clifford Chance has closed three of its four California offices and has now paid $3.75 million to settle claims related to the collapse of Brobeck Phleger & Harrison. Brobeck’s bankruptcy trustee has filed a complaint against some of the former Brobeck partners

The founding partner of Baker Johnson Lawyers, one of Brisbane’s biggest law firms, has stood down from his position amid claims he allegedly overcharged clients and called them crude names. Michael Vincent Baker, who faces being struck from the Roll of Solicitors, retired as a partner on Thursday, but will stay on as a consultant.

At Westminster,among Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs, the name Elizabeth Wilmshurst has become something of a byword for principle and pluck. Ms Wilmshurst was the lawyer who defied her political masters at the Foreign Office and told them they would violate international law if they joined the American invasion of Iraq. Her political masters ignored

Sullivan & Cromwell has stayed in pole position at the top of the US M&A tables for the first half of 2004, with corporate stalwarts Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz and Cravath Swaine & Moore both surging up the table. Sullivan kept the top place, which it secured in the first quarter, by advising on

After deliberating for several months over a fitting punishment for lawyer Gary Neinstein, a disciplinary panel of the Law Society of Upper Canada decided the 62-year-old man must be stripped of his right to practise law for sexually harassing two women in the mid-1990s. Mr. Neinstein, a well-known lawyer in the personal injury field, filed

The army of lawyers swarming around Royal Dutch/Shell Group, which touched off a collapse in its stock price after it admitted inflating proved reserves, has been joined by a new, veteran member. Securities lawyer William Lerach, famed for playing a lead role in many of the biggest shareholder class action suits of the past two

“Tesco law” came a step closer when Britain’s biggest supermarket chain launched its own online legal service. As well as a cheap service for will writing and storage, already available from other sources, Tesco Legal Store offers Do-It-Yourself divorce kits for £7.49 that can end a marriage without the need for a solicitor. Other services

Berwin Leighton Paisner walked away with the prestigious, Law Firm of the Year award but the biggest cheer of the evening went to the winners of the Public Sector Team of the Year Award: the Hutton Inquiry team. It was that inquiry which had “ruined the summer” of the host for the evening, Tony Blair’s