By Joseph Schuman

Fed sees signs of economic strengthening for the legal sector

11/30/11

Yet more encouraging economic news for the legal sector comes today from the Federal Reserve. Banking and business contacts of the regional Federal Reserve banks describe just slow to moderate growth in general economic activity since the last Beige Book came out in mid-October. But there are scattered anecdotal signs of strength for law firms.

In the New York region, while securities firms are reducing their overall staffing, they are hiring in the legal and compliance areas.

From the New England region, the Boston Fed reports that while labor demand is generally flat, officials are hearing about a hiring uptick in the legal sector. Large law firms in Philadelphia's mid-Atlantic district are feeling confident enough to shop for trophy office space, which has helped the nonresidential real estate market there.

And the Dallas Fed said that while most prices are stable or falling, firms have been able to increase billing rates for legal services. Law firms in the Dallas region are also reporting steady demand and even a slight pickup in litigation activity, as well as "continued strength in intellectual property, energy and some real-estate related services." The only other hint of legal activity in the current Beige Book comes from the San Francisco region, where it's described as unchanged like the rest of the professional services sector.

Anthrax settlement illustrates government culpability in the 2001 attacks

11/30/11

It's a legal settlement that adds insult to the national injury suffered in late 2001, when five people were killed and 17 others infected by anthrax just weeks after the 9/11 attacks. It took the FBI nearly seven years to track down the alleged culprit, who committed suicide before he could be put on trial. And now the government has agreed to settle -- for $2.5 million -- a case brought by the family of Robert Stevens, the first anthrax victim. As part of the deal, the government also admitted that it was responsible for letting the deadly virus fall into the wrong hands in the first place, The New York Times reports.

Stevens was a photo editor at a Florida-based tabloid newspaper when he inhaled anthrax powder from one of the envelopes mailed to news organizations and two Democratic senators. He died days later. In 2003, his widow sued, claiming the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick didn't sufficiently secure the anthrax spores stored there.

The Stevens family lawyer, Richard Schuler, tells the Times that documents and testimony in the case showed the government failed to adequately screen scientists who worked with such pathogens, as well as weak inventory controls for anthrax and similarly dangerous materials, and defective laboratory security. "There was a serious potential danger to society from a biological attack as a result of either an insider or outsider getting access to these lethal organisms," he says.

It's the second multimillion-dollar government settlement resulting from the anthrax attacks. The Justice Department agreed to pay $4.6 million in 2008 to former Fort Detrick scientist Steven J. Hatfill, whose name was repeatedly leaked to news media by officials who called him the primary suspect and whose property and possessions were examined by the FBI before the live cameras of cable news networks. That same year the FBI said the real perpetrator was microbiologist Bruce Ivins, who had worked on anthrax vaccines at the lab. But Ivins killed himself just as he was about to be indicted.

Higher in-house legal spending belies talk of cutting costs

11/30/11

Ah, the economic winds are as fickle in the legal industry as they are in the broader economy. Yesterday Summary Judgments readers heard the alarming news of stagnant bonus growth at venerable New York firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and what that might portend for lawyers everywhere. Today, we get some good news.

The 2011 survey of chief legal officers by the consulting group Altman Weil finds healthier spending levels for both in-house attorneys and outside counsel, Corporate Counsel magazine reports. In results the consultancy found surprising given the sluggish economy, 56 percent of the CLOs said their budgets were up from last year, and the median increase was 7 percent. Both numbers beat the growth reported in 2010. Altman Weil principal Daniel DiLucchio says clients keep telling him they want to focus on reducing and controlling costs. But their actions, he says, tell a different story. "You have to wonder," he says, "if there's a disconnect between this idea that controlling costs is the number one issue and what's actually happening."

Would courts be forced to enforce a budget amendment?

11/30/11

The budget debates gripping Washington move into the legal realm today, with a Senate hearing on "the perils of constitutionalizing" the process through a balanced budget amendment. But politics more than law will likely govern the discourse. As this Summary Judgments post was being written, a judiciary subcommittee was hearing testimony from two pairs of economic wonks on the left and right, and just one academic summoned for legal analysis.

Robert Greenstein, president of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, was arguing that a balanced budget amendment would destroy "the village in order to save it" by increasing the "risk of tipping faltering economies into recessions and making recessions longer and deeper." Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the top economic adviser to John McCain's 2008 Republican bid for the White House, kept calling the measure a "fiscal rule" rather than a constitutional amendment, but praised it for giving "Congress a way to say 'no.'"

And George Washington University Law Professor Alan Morrison planned to tell the committee why such an amendment was as bad an idea as it was when he first testified on the subject 15 years ago. Congress, he argues, would be faced with the politically unacceptable need to make the new budget process enforceable by federal courts, or the Supreme Court will almost certainly rule that no one has standing to sue if the amendment is violated. "That will mean that the amendment, which is being sold as an elixir for all our budgetary ills, will be virtually toothless," according to Morrison. "And if the amendment does provide for judicial review, the courts are a wholly inappropriate entity to resolve the kind of questions that must be faced, and remedies ordered, so that there is a balanced budget for a given fiscal year."

ICC gets its hands on ex-Ivorian leader Gbagbo

11/30/11

There's one more alleged war criminal in the detention cells of the Hague today. Former Cote d'Ivoire President Laurent Koudou Gbagbo was whisked into custody of the International Criminal Court after a secret arrest warrant was given to the Ivorian authorities yesterday.

As Summary Judgments readers may remember, the court opened its investigation of alleged crimes against humanity there less than two months ago, and the swift, secretive transfer of Gbagbo is a coup for an institution still establishing its authority less than a decade after opening for business.

Judges at the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber III issued the warrant under seal last week, and Gbagbo was expected to make his first appearance before them later today. He is accused of being an indirect co-perpetrator on four counts of crimes against humanity: murder, rape, persecution and other inhuman acts. The crimes were allegedly committed in the wake of last year's disputed election, from December 2010 through this past April, when Gbagbo gave in to global pressure and surrendered.

The judges said they "found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that in the aftermath of the presidential elections in CÂte d'Ivoire pro-Gbagbo forces attacked the civilian population in Abidjan and in the west of the country . targeting civilians who they believed were supporters of the opponent candidate," according to the ICC.

Cote d'Ivoire isn't a party to the Rome Statute establishing the ICC, but since 2003 it has accepted the war-crimes court's jurisdiction.

That legal welcome mat was reaffirmed by Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara in May after United Nations and French forces helped him assume the office he won in the election. Gbagbo becomes the highest-profile prisoner of the ICC, which has indicted other current or former chiefs of state - including Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir and Libya's late Moammar Gaddafi -- without getting its hands on them.

Man planning animated tale of Michael Jackson's 'murder' files copyright suit

11/30/11

The sentencing of Dr. Conrad Murray for the death of Michael Jackson may wrap up one of the biggest tabloid trials of the year, but it doesn't mean we've seen the last of the Jackson litigation genre.

Murray is also at the center of a copyright case filed last week in U.S. district court in Texas, with what the Hollywood Reporter describes as an "error-prone, punctuation-happy complaint." Everett Watson says he is at work on an animated film he wrote and conceived called, "Murder of Michael Jackson: The Perfect Murder." Watson tried to get Sony to look at the script, but the studio refused. So he paid a law firm a $550 retainer and $275 an hour to examine the script, for which Watson says he got a "partial agreement with the firm to produce and market the film."

Watson's description of his script in his complaint might sound familiar to anyone who followed the Murray trial and the death of the pop superstar: It "involves the death of Michael Jackson. The c.p.r. attempt. The transporting of Michael Jackson to the hospital! The discovery of the propofol! The quest to find out who gives Michael the propofol! It covers other suspects. It reveals Conrad Murray as a potential suspect without a clear motive then goes on to present a possible motive for the murder." But Watson insists it is his own story.

In the lawsuit, Watson also lobs a J'accuse at MSNBC, which paid Murray for an interview the network aired earlier this month. He goes on to argue, rather inscrutably, that the Murray interview infringed the copyright of Watson's script. "Conrad Murray had no right to sell any story under the guise of A documentary to anyone. That story is copyrighted," Watson tells the court. The interview, he adds, had so many elements "that are protected from reproduction by anyone without my consent it has to prevented from further broadcast or I will not be able to profit from my work."

Summary Judgments for Nov. 29

Summary Judgments for Nov. 28

Summary Judgments for Nov. 25

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