Linklaters, SJ Berwin, Macfarlanes and Diageo’s legal team were among the big winners at the 2005 Legal Week Awards. Linklaters was named International Firm of the Year with Legal Week’s editorial team citing a year of international expansion, impressive financial performance and slick management. SJ Berwin narrowly beat the highly-rated Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) to […]

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

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

Many executives dream of dominating their industries the way BAR/BRI does the business of helping law school graduates prepare for bar examinations. Every law student knows BAR/BRI. Hundreds of thousands of them have taken its courses to pass the bar, an essential step in most states before a law school graduate can practice law. Some

The family suing Walt Disney Co. in a decade-old case over marketing rights to children’s book character Winnie the Pooh has hired a new team of attorneys, including a former state appeals court judge, it said in a statement on Friday. Stephen Slesinger Inc., the corporation that represents the Slesinger family’s interests, said it had

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

William Lerach, 57, is a flamboyant, sharp-elbowed showman. Together, as cochairmen of one of the most feared law firms in the nation, Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, they have bullied corporate America out of $30 billion in damages and counting. In building the modern-day model for the shareholder class action, their mission has been

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

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