• Law.com – Sonnenschein Settles Fee Dispute With Ex-Client Who Lost Money With Madoff – The title is a little misleading – at least if you have the "normal" expectations around these sorts of things. Sonnenschein wins! They got a little less than they sought, but they're going to get paid $650,000. $500k now and $150k when they finish up a tax opinion.
• lawjobs.com Career Center – How Law Firms Can Maintain Better Relationships With Laid-Off Alumni – This is a drum we've been beating for a while. Firms should have done a lot more for the people they laid off and they should have handled the whole process better. We wrote about the distinction between stealth layoffs, which are a necessary part of the BigLaw model, and covert layoffs, which are a bastardization.
• Lawyers and your money: Curbing those long, lucrative hours | The Economist – Interesting stuff, but it's for a mainstream audience so you've probably heard most of it before. And our former sponsor Chrometa gets a nice bit of publicity at the end.
• U.S. Copyright Office – Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Request – Librarian of Congress gives a big, fat present to data liberators everywhere. It's now OK to "jailbreak" an iPhone, contrary to what Apple has long claimed, rip DVDs (for limited purposes) and a do whole bunch of other stuff with your information and equipment.
• POM sued by Hogan Lovells over legal tab – Scary disclaimer. We'll set the line on the agency whose name can't be mentioned at FDA -200, FTC +150. And that's pure speculation, not based on any court records!

Related posts:

1. Quick Shucks – 5/13/10
2. Quick Shucks – 7/9/10
3. Quick Shucks – 1/19/10

Olufemi Nicol (Right)

We’re going to have to set up a separate department for the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.

The same bar authorities that brought us such wonders as Loren Elliotte Friedman (flunked out of med school, lied on law school and BigLaw applications, went to B school), Mark Maciasz (moonlighting H&K lawyer), and most-recently Christian Kline (contract lawyer who overbilled the hell out of Mayer Brown), now brings us a new tale of lawyerly woe.

Today’s (alleged) miscreant is Olufemi F. Nicol (HT: Legal Profession Blog).

His tale of woe, after the jump.

Things started off well enough for Nicol.  He got his law degree from Chicago in 1994.  He stayed local, spending three years at Ross & Hardies (which was acquired by McGuire Woods in 1993) then moved across town to Schiff Hardin.  From 2000-06 he had a number of non-legal jobs.

For some reason, Nicol decided to return to Illinois in 05 and started working on his MBA at Chicago in June.  He borrowed a little under $80k to pay for school, which was disbursed in a number of installments from June 05 through March 06, when he stopped attending.

Almost a year later, in April 07, he took a job at DLA Piper in Chicago, working in the corporate and securities group.  Interestingly, his starting salary was “only” $190,000.  We don’t know what the associate scale in Chicago was back then, but it definitely seems he was put back several class years (remember, he was a 94 grad).

Meanwhile, the forbearances expired, although he did get one extension.  Conveniently, he got a raise to $220,000 at the same time the payments started coming due in January 08.

That was short-lived, however.  Olufemi Nicol was among the 180 people (80 lawyers, 100 staff) laid off by DLA Piper in February 09 – part of the Valentine’s Day massacre and amid one of the worst weeks in law-firm layoff history.

At that point, Nicol had already ignored the lenders’ collection efforts for 14 months.

Three months later, the lenders referred the matter to the Illinois disciplinary authorities who began an investigation.

He treated that investigation just like the debt-collection efforts – by not responding at all, even to a subpoena.

Now, he’s facing sanctions.  The investigator alleges Nicol enaged in the following malpractice:

1. failure to respond to a lawful demand for information from the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission in violation of Rule 8.1(a)(2) of the Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct;
2. conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice in violation of Rule 8.4(a)(5) of the Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct; and
3. conduct which tends to defeat the administration of justice or to bring the courts or the legal profession into disrepute in violation of Supreme Court Rule 770.

That picture of him above is from a pro bono project he was involved with at DLA Piper involving Addis Ababa schools.

We’ll keep you posted on further updates.

If you know anything about him, please share in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Catching Up With Med School Drop-Out/Suspended Lawyer/B-School Student Loren Friedman
2. Flunked out of Med School, Disbarred, What Next?
3. Suspension Recommended for Moonlighting Former H&K Lawyer

Vault has begun rolling out its rankings of firms by practice areas.

No real surprises in Antitrust. The top four remain the same.

The big mover was Boies Schiler, which plummeted from T-4 to #13. That’s a bit of a headscratcher. If a firm was going to drop, we’d think Howrey would be more likely, but it held on at #3. The firm has been cutting costs (and partners) after a rough 2009 in which PPP dropped precipitously.

Covington was the highest new entry, coming in at #12, but we can’t imagine how they weren’t ranked last year.

The Top 10 after the jump and the full rankings at Vault.

No Cravath, but if the IBM action heats up, we’d expect to see them on it. And if Hogan Lovells does get the European work, as we predict, they should climb higher.

How does that match your expectations?

Related posts:

1. Layoffs in the Vault 25
2. Layoffs in Vault 26-50
3. Rounding Up the Vault 100

Completely coincidentally, we came across Greenberg Traurig’s unfortunate result in a dispute between two piracy* websites on the same day we ran into another, much higher-profile and better-represented domain dispute.

* As caveated in that post

This one features Paul Weiss and Gibson Dunn.

Details after the jump (including a good example you can use when someone asks you what gross negligence is).


Baidu is the Google of China, to use the common metaphor.  It’s actually blowing Google away for search in China, but you get the picture.  It’s huge.

Register.com is one of the world’s largest domain registrars.  It handles the registration and mapping of millions of domain names.

A not particularly sophisticated, but very lucky hacker set his sights on Baidu.  He was able to dupe a Register.com agent into giving him access to the Baidu account, which he used to redirect the Baidu domain name to another site.  Baidu was effectively down for five hours and took two days to recover.

Baidu, of course, sued for a whole host of losses, and Register.com moved to dismiss, which was denied in large part.

How did the hacker get the access?

The attack was allegedly made possible when a person pretending to be with Baidu called tech support through an internet chat service at Register.com and asked to change an e-mail address on file for Baidu.

The intruder gave the incorrect answer when asked to provide security verification, but was e-mailed a security code anyway. The tech support representative then asked to have the security code repeated back through the chat service and the intruder responded with a different, and inaccurate, code.

But the Register.com representative did not compare the two codes and went on to change the e-mail address, which gave the intruder the chance to access Baidu’s account with Register.com. Once the intruder used the automatic “forgot password” function in response to a request from Register.com for Baidu’s name and password, the intruder went on to reroute the internet traffic.

The part we found particularly hilarious is that actual employees of Baidu then called Register.com and were completely unable to get as much help as the hacker who knew nothing got in the chat room.

Quite a few of the claims were thrown out, but the gross negligence, recklessness, and breach of contract will be allowed to proceed.

Carey Ramos (Yale BA ’76, Stanford JD ’79) and Marc Falcone (Columbia BA ’80, Chicago JD ’83) of Paul, Weiss represent Baidu.

Orin Snyder (Wesleyan BA ’83, Penn JD ’86) and Alexander Southwell (Princeton BA ’93, NYU JD ’97) of Gibson Dunn represent Register.com.

Related posts:

1. Finnegan Wins Domain Dispute for Yahoo!
2. Fenwick Associate Wins Domain for Google's Newest Project
3. BigLaw in the Middle of CrunchPad Dispute

Greenberg Traurig represented a plaintiff in a domain dispute and lost, despite the respondent’s complete lack of participation.  [HT: Randazza]

To add irony to the embarrassment, plaintiff RapidShare.com is one of the biggest facilitators of software piracy on the internet.  (Although to be fair, a German court recently ruled that RapidShare itself was not responsible for the infringement by its users.)

So how does a website represented by one of the world’s top law firms lose a case to an unrepresented Russian running another piracy-promoting website?

Details after the jump.


The WIPO Domain Dispute is RapidShare AG , Christian Schmid v. N/A Maxim Tvortsov, Case No. D2010-0696.

The action is a dispute between RapidShare  (which, by the way, are allegedly the 12th-most visited on the internet), and Tvortsov’s “RapidBay.net”

For those who didn’t make the glaringly obvious derivation of that name, it’s an amalgam of RAPIDshare + thepirateBAY – the peanut butter and chocolate of software piracy (the panelist considered that the “bay” might be short for “eBay,” but we think the full-on piracy theme is more likely).

And again, just so there’s no confusion – both sites have had varying degrees of success in disassociating themselves from the nefarious purposes to which their users have put the sites.

Greenberg Traurig’s pleadings alleged three main issues (the short version without internal citations):

1. The Domain Name is confusingly similar to RapidShare’s mark. It consists of RapidShare’s mark, switching out the element “share” for the element “bay”. The deletion of the element “share” and the addition of the element “bay” does nothing to distinguish the Domain Name from RapidShare’s mark.

2. The Respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the Domain Name.

3. The Domain Name was registered in bad faith, and has been used in bad faith.

Tvortsov never bothered to respond, but WIPO appears to have tighter standards against default judgments than the vague memories we have of Civil Procedure from many many moons ago.

According to the ruling,

Where a respondent has not submitted a response, paragraph 5(e) of the Rules requires the Panel to “decide the dispute based on the complaint”. Under paragraph 14(b) of the Rules, the Panel may draw such inferences from a respondent’s failure to comply with the Rules (e.g. by failing to file a response), as the Panel considers appropriate.

And decide the panelist did.

The Complainants have not proved that they have any trademark or service mark rights in the expression “rapid bay”, or in the word “rapid”. The only relevant right they have proved is a right in the expression “rapidshare”. The issue is whether the use of the word “rapid” in both RapidShare’s mark and the Domain Name, is enough to get the Complainants over the line on the “confusingly similar” issue. On balance, the Panel is not satisfied that it is.

Losing to a no-show pirate isn’t even the worst WIPO loss we’ve written about for Greenberg Traurig.

The firm also brought a suit on behalf of a client against poker pro, and familiar opponent of the firm, Dutch Boyd (who just won another WSOP bracelet (2nd item)) in which the action was found to have been brought in bad faith and constituted an attempt at reverse hijacking.

We’re sure they’ve won plenty of others, but don’t expect to find those two cases in the firm’s marketing materials.

Related posts:

1. Poker Pro/Law Grad Fighting Familiar BigLaw Foe
2. More BigLaw in Another Domain Dispute
3. W&C Loses Objection, Creditors Outed

We’ve had extremely low expectations for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps for a long time.

Basically, from the time we heard Shia (“No Relation to Dewey &”) LeBoeuf was going to play the spiritual successor to Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox, we’ve been expecting a train wreck.

Looks like it’s going to slide under even our already depressed prediction.

According to ClusterStock, not only does the movie have a whole bunch of idiotic things going on (especially, as far as we’re concerned, vis a vis LeBoeuf’s character), but it was panned in a review by the Wall Street Journal’s Mean Street blog.

And now when we go to read the review the WSJ has taken it down.

In its place is the following notice

A Mean Street blog posting that reviewed the new Oliver Stone movie, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” has been removed from WSJ.com because of a misunderstanding of the terms under which the working copy was screened.

As if the title of the review, “Mean Street: Oliver Stone’s Muddled, Middling Wall Street Sequel,” weren’t enough of an indication of where it was going, the first line was “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a mess of a film.”

Our fears have been confirmed.  They’ve desecrated the legacy of one of Hollywood’s finest achievements.

(By the way, we’re not kidding about our love for the original movie)

Let us know if you have a link to or the text of the original post.

Related posts:

1. "Wall Street" Sequel Gets Green Light
2. Wall Street Even Owns Tech Deals
3. Get Ready for Blawg Review

Ashby Jones at the WSJ Law Blog has a nice summary of the two big investigations into IBM’s alleged anticompetitive practices announced by the European Union.

As is being batted around a lot today, IBM is no stranger to antitrust investigations.  The company went through a 13-year fight, from 1969-1982 that set all sorts of records at the time for length, motions, document produced, and on and on.  72 linear feet of documents are maintained in an archive, for those who are curious (and weird).

There are scores of Cravath lawyers who grew up doing antitrust work for IBM, the most notable of whom is probably David Boies.  The IBM antitrust case is also the source of the legendary tale of the lawyer who billed more than 24 hours in a day, according to The Partners: Inside America’s Most Powerful Law Firms (aff link).

But the latest action is happening in Europe, where Cravath isn’t historically strong in antitrust.

After the jump, we speculate on who might get the work (and one firm we’re pretty sure won’t).

Cravath still must be considered, however.  The firm’s one non-US office is in London, and does have some antitrust capability over there.  Cravath also has been handling the recent US investigation of basically the same behavior.  If nothing else, they’ll play a lead role coordinating the response to the US and EU actions.

IBM used two other firms in getting dismissal of a recent civil suit that also related to similar behavior: Quinn Emanuel and Hogan & Hartson.

Quinn Emanuel has been rolling out a London practice this year, but there’s no way they’re up to leading something like this.  A few months ago the office brought in a fourth partner.

Hogan Lovells, on the other hand, has extensive competition capacity and experience in Europe, mostly through the legacy Lovells side of the business.

One firm to bet against: Covington & Burling.  The firm has been doing some antitrust work for Microsoft, including tattling on Google (last item).  But what IBM really won’t like is that it thinks Microsoft is using T3 as a shill to cause all these problems in the first place.

There are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in billable hours at stake here.  What other firms do you think might be in, or out?

Related posts:

1. Quinn Emanuel Tries Plaintiff Side of Fee Dispute
2. Cravath, Cahill Knock $115 Million out of Deal
3. Quinn Emanuel in Fee Dispute (Again)

The steaming pile of suck that was The Deep End has not deterred producers from trying to bring our little slice of heaven to television.

Per Deadline Hollywood:

Gabriel Macht has closed a deal to star opposite Patrick J. Adams in USA Network’s pilot A Legal Mind. The pilot centers on Mike Ross (Adams), a brilliant but unmotivated college student who gets recruited by a Harvey Specter (Macht), a lawyer at top Manhattan corporate law firm despite not having a law degree. He has to use his book and street smarts and hustling skills to keep the charade. The project has a two-male-lead setup in the vein of the network’s series White Collar. ICM-repped Macht will next be seen in Ed Zwick’s Love and Other Drugs.

Among Macht’s 28 IMDB credits is a single-episode apperance on Beverly Hills 90210 and a bunch of other stuff we’ve never seen.  Adams has a similarly unrecognizable opus (at least to us).

We’ve also Quick Shucked developments on a couple of other pending legal dramas: Alfred Molina joined the cast of Law & Order: LA, joining Skeet Ulrich; and NBC is working on “Harry’s Law,” starring Nate Corddry and Kathy Bates.

Update: We forgot to mention the rework of The Firm.

Related posts:

1. The Firm Coming to TV?

• Trader’s Cocoa Binge Wraps Up Chocolate Market – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com – No BigLaw angle (yet), but they've started calling trader Anthony Ward "Chocolate Finger," after the Bond villain "Goldfinger." There's probably a Butterfinger joke in there, too.
• Facebook: Contract Giving Up Ownership Was ‘Forged’ – ABC News – Maybe we're reading too much between the lines here – is Facebook saying Zuck didn't sign the contract at all or is Facebook saying Zuck didn't sign a contract that says he gave up the 84%?
• Goldman, the Movie. By Goldman – WSJ.com – We know lots of law firms do vanity books around anniversaries and other events, but we've never heard of one going as over the top as this. Goldman hired a documentarian (Ken Burns's brother) to create this self-tribute, which, unfortunately, won't be publicly released.
• Alfred Molina To Star In ‘Law & Order: LA’ – Deadline.com – He'll be the deputy DA.
• SEC Awards $1 Million for Information Provided in Insider Trading Case – File under: "Hell Hath No Fury…" The recipient is a woman who used to be married to a guy who worked at Microsoft and didn't turn over a critical document in the Pequot Capital insider trading imbroglio.

Related posts:

1. Quick Shucks – 7/7/10
2. Quick Shucks – 5/5/10
3. Quick Shucks – 7/22/10

As August approaches, the recruiting process shifts from the summer programs which are in full (relatively speaking) swing to on-campus interviewing.

Summer-program sizes were down 44% this year, compared to the classes of 2009. That goes to show just how awkward the law-firm hiring process is. Last year’s summers were given offers in Fall 2008 as the markets were already cratering, but firms didn’t know how bad things would get or how long it would last, so hiring was pretty close to the previous year’s levels.

Skip over all the layoffs, deferrals, and rescinded offers since then, and a full year later, in Fall 2009, the firms were finally able to slash their pipeline by almost half.

Last year, almost 20 firms had summer programs with more than 100 participants. This year there were only two: the much-vilified Latham, and Gibson Dunn, both of which hosted 110. Summer legal employment is now at its lowest levels since 1991.

And that includes the two laid-off lawyers who are appearing on The Apprentice.

After the jump, more of what’s going on in BigLaw – including firm failings, layoffs, malpractice, and a few good things, too.


Firm News

A British firm failed this week. Haliwells’ assets were sold to three other regional UK firms. Approximately 700 people will be taken on by the new firms, but at least 38 were made redundant (including one partner and two trainees). Also left out in the cold are 45 would-be Halliwells trainees whose offers were rescinded. One of the acquiring firms does plan to pick up at least 24 over the next three years. The balance will have to start the search anew.

Merger talks between Kilpatrick Stockton and Townsend and Townsend and Crew (note how annoying the Townsend styling is, which makes it impossible to read that clause without actually knowing the names of the two firms or using the annoying “on the one hand/on the other hand” structure) finally broke down. They blamed a “major Kilpatrick client” who wouldn’t waive conflicts.

(Mal)Practice

Malpractice suits against firms may be on the rise as tough times cause parties to search ever more desperately for someone to blame for bad results. And we’ve got them in spades this week.

Baker Botts has been sued for malpractice resulting from alleged conflicts in its representation of a patent client. The firm says there is no merit to the claim that it didn’t properly represent Axcess International in managing its patent portfolio in the RFID sector, which resulted in another supposed Baker Botts client obtaining significant rights and Axcess not getting all it thinks it should have.

It’s bad enough when firms get sued for losing cases, but winning and getting sued is even worse. That’s what Manatt Phelps and McKool Smith are dealing with, as a bunch of retired NFL players are suing the firms for not getting the retirees enough in a $26 million settlement with the players’ union after a positive jury verdict. The players think the firms should have included the retirees in a settlement with Electronic Arts over likeness rights in the blockbuster Madden video-game series. Dewey & LeBoeuf was on the losing end at trial but has nothing to do with this action.

That’s not even the only bad news Manatt Phelps got last week. A malicious-prosecution suit against Manatt Phelps was just reinstated on appeal. Back in 1998, the firm sued Franklin Mint for dilution of its clients likeness rights by some Princess Diana collectibles, which we’re sure were sublimely classy.

Boies Schiller & Flexner also got bad news on appeal. A model’s suit accusing the firm of fraud and malpractice for agreeing to represent her individually but then including her in a class action was reinstated by a New York appellate court.

Sheppard Mullin and Epstein Becker fared better. A federal judge threw out claims that the firms had been improperly paid for representing a credit repair organization in a class action. Sheppard Mullin went pro se and Arent Fox was represented by Skadden.

Suits

As for litigation in which law firms are relegated to their more-common role as simple advocates, rather than defendants, there were a few interesting ones.

Orrick’s Lisa Simpson appeared on Facebook’s behalf at a New York hearing at which she was forced to admit the possibility that her client had signed the contract. Elie jumped in with his take on the legal analysis. Summary: no meeting of the minds.

Dell settled with the SEC over fraudulent-accounting charges. The chipmaker agreed to pay $100 million, and founder Michael Dell an additional $4 million – or about 0.03% of his $13.5 billion net worth (2nd item). Skadden represented the company and Wachtell represented Dell.

$100 million is a magic number. It turns out that’s also how much Google spent defending its YouTube business against Viacom’s infringement suit. Viacom probably spent a similar amount bringing the claims, so that was a nice chunk of change for all the firms involved.

The facts are slowly starting to come out, but there could be more to the latest smear on Facebook’s title than originally expected. Paul Ceglia, a guy who owns a New York wood-pellet company (and was recently arrested for fraud in that business), showed up out of the blue with a 2003 contract with Mark Zuckerberg purportedly entitling Ceglia to 84% of the social-media company.

One weird thing about litigation, as opposed to deals, is that apparently you can settle a suit without actually having the money to pay. Such appears to be the case in AIG’s $725 million with Ohio pension companies. Paul Weiss led the defense.

It’s certainly not malpractice, but Debevoise got an amusing slap from the bench in a pro bono case of all things. The judge chided the firm’s “unwarranted persistence” and reminded the lawyers that pro bono efforts “should be undertaken with special attention to the need for ensuring that matters are not pursued without regard to a lack of realistic prospects for success … as well as the very real economic costs to adversaries.”

Salaries

Logic doesn’t appear to be one of the strong suits for law-school applicants, at least as far as cost-benefit analysis or expected-value calculation. The next step in the logic chain from the disappearance of all those jobs is that salary numbers are plummeting. Lawyers’ salaries continue to show a bimodal curve, with an ever-shrinking peak at BigLaw salary, but a larger and growing peak at an extremely low level and moving left.

We don’t want to confuse lawyers with math (or do any more math than necessary), so we’ll try to keep it simple. Don’t be fooled by the average. Not only do you have even less chance of making it into BigLaw, but if you miss, your salary won’t be “almost” BigLaw – it will be around 40% of that or less.

The legal market has turned into a spin on the old accountants’ joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar and the average net worth of the patrons goes up by billions.

The problem is understandable. We all think we’re above average, and once you’re in, BigLaw is a nice place to be (speaking about compensation only).

Three firms have reverted to the “$160k scale” in the past few weeks. Akin Gump, WilmerHale, and DLA Piper have all done so, albeit each with its own variations for performance-based bonuses.

Hogan Lovells is sifting through the integration issues and is making true-up payments in New York for those who made hours.

In London, Weil has “unfrozen” but salaries are still slightly below 2008 levels.

Sui Generis

Law and pro wrestling have more in common than you’d expect.

Related posts:

1. This Week in BigLaw – 6/4/10
2. This Week in BigLaw – 5/14/10
3. This Week in BigLaw – 4/16/10