Good morning. A day after jurors delivered their landmark verdict in Derek Chauvin's trial, legal experts are examining what might be in store for the expected appeal. In other news, the former top federal prosecutor in the U.S. Capitol riot cases has joined Kobre & Kim, new data is revealing the tougher job market law school graduates faced amid the pandemic, and Big Tech critic and Columbia Law antitrust scholar Lina Khan is up for her FTC confirmation hearing in the Senate. Let's get going!
Our guest contributor today is Chinekwu Osakwe. Were you forwarded this email? Subscribe here.
Chauvin appeal to likely focus on media coverage, settlement
For a moment on Tuesday afternoon, Americans paused to watch on TV and online as a judge read out loud the most anticipated verdict in a generation.
But now that a jury has found Derek Chauvin guilty of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, the work begins for the former Minneapolis police officer's lawyers to try to overturn the verdict and for prosecutors to fight to sustain the rare rebuke of law enforcement's treatment of Black Americans.
Legal experts told Tom Hals that Chauvin's lawyers will likely challenge the verdict by arguing the jury was prejudiced by media coverage and the announcement of a $27 million settlement between the city and Floyd's family.
That deal, announced in the midst of jury selection, had an "incredible propensity to taint a jury pool," Chauvin's attorney Eric Nelson said in unsuccessfully seeking to delay the trial.
Other likely appellate fodder could be Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill's decision to hold the trial in Minneapolis, the focal point of racial justice protests that followed Floyd's May 2020 death.
Still, legal experts said the odds of a successful appeal are slim, and prosecutors have extra hands on deck to challenge it. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's team includes Neal Katyal, a top appellate specialist at Hogan Lovells and a former acting solicitor general during the Obama administration. Learn more.
Industry buzz
- Michael Sherwin, a career federal prosecutor who in his most recent stint as the acting U.S. attorney for D.C. oversaw the criminal cases arising out of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, has joined Kobre & Kim as a partner. An interview he recently gave to CBS' "60 Minutes" in which he said he believed more serious charges of sedition could be filed against some rioters prompted criticism from a judge and a referral by the DOJ to an internal watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility. (Reuters)
- The U.S. Senate on a 98-2 vote confirmed Lisa Monaco to serve as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the DOJ. Monaco, who most recently was a partner at O'Melveny & Myers, garnered bipartisan support from Democrats and prominent Republicans including Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley. Who voted against her? Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky. (Reuters)
- New lobbying disclosure reports show that the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck came out as the top grossing lobbying firm in Washington for the first quarter of the year. The firm raked in more than $12.53 million during January to March, slightly more than during the same period last. It edged out Akin Gump, which reported $12.52 million. (The Hill)
- The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have had an impact on employment for 2020 law school graduates. Full-time legal employment dipped by 2.6% for the class of 2020 compared to the prior year's graduates, according to data from the the American Bar Association. (Reuters)
- White & Case topped Refinitiv's worldwide legal advisor league table for the first quarter with 132 announced deals, as dealmaking hit record highs. John Reiss, global head of White & Case's mergers and acquisitions group, told Caroline Spieizo that the boom is "driven by the surprising economic performance of many, many companies, and the confidence that there's a real light at the end of the tunnel with respect to COVID." (Reuters)
- Elizabeth Reese, a member of the Nambé Pueblo, is set to become Stanford Law School's first Native American faculty member. She'll join its faculty on June 1 as an assistant professor of law with a focus on American Indian tribal law. (Stanford)
- Texas' House of Representatives passed two new bills that will allow public school systems to establish law schools in El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley. The schools may be able to help meet the legal needs of those close to the Mexican border. The legislation has been sent to the Texas Senate to consider. (Texas Lawyer)
Coming up today
- The U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on the viability of the patent law doctrine of "assignor estoppel." Under the doctrine, a party that assigns its patent rights to another is barred from later arguing that the patent is invalid as a defense to an infringement case. Medical device company Minerva was co-founded by Csaba Truckai, who, while working at a company now owned by Hologic, assigned his employer patents concerning devices to treat endometrial ablation. The Federal Circuit held that Minerva, repped by Sidley Austin's Robert Hochman, could not challenge the validity of those patents when Hologic began accusing it of an infringement because of the assignment. Matthew Wolf of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer represents Hologic. Learn more about the case.
- The 2nd Circuit will re-hear a challenge by Robert Olan and Ted Huber, two former partners at the hedge fund Deerfield Management, and two other individuals to their convictions for taking part in a scheme to illegally trade healthcare stocks based on leaks about pending U.S. healthcare regulatory changes. Prosecutors recently said that the bulk of the convictions should be overturned because under the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last year in the "Bridgegate" case, government information could not be considered property under the fraud and conversion statutes. Donald Verrilli of Munger Tolles & Olson, Olan's lawyer, will argue the appeal for the appellants.
- The Delaware Supreme Court will consider whether to revive a lawsuit by creditors of the now-bankrupt Oceanografia who accuse the accounting firm KPMG of failing to adequately audit the oil services company and Citigroup's Mexican unit Banamex and prevent a massive fraud. The scandal at Banamex emerged in 2014 when Citigroup revealed it had uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars in bogus loans to Oceanografia, a service provider to Mexican state-run oil giant Pemex. The creditors, represented by Quinn Emanuel's David Cooper, say the collapse of Oceanografía caused them to lose $1.1 billion. Foley & Lardner's Christopher Kise will argue for KPMG.
- Senior executives with Google and Apple will testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel about competition concerns related to their app stores along with executives of three companies that rely on those online stores. Witnesses before the Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights Subcommittee will include Wilson White, Google’s senior director of government affairs; Apple Chief Compliance Officer Kyle Andeer; Horacio Gutierrez, the chief legal officer of Spotify; Match Group's CLO, Jared Sine; and Kirsten Daru, general counsel for Tile. Learn more about the hearing.
- That's not the only Big Tech antitrust happenings in Congress today. The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Lina Khan, a 32-year-old Columbia Law School associate professor, antitrust scholar and Big Tech critic. She rose to fame as a law student with a 2017 article in the Yale Law Journal called "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" that argued for the breakup of Amazon. Some Republicans have voiced concerns about her views.
- The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will vote on President Joe Biden's nomination of California labor secretary Julie Su to serve as deputy secretary of labor. Su at a March confirmation hearing faced pointed questions from Republican senators about California paying out billions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims during the COVID-19 pandemic under her watch.
- Seventeen environmental groups represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center will urge U.S. District Judge James Jones in Charlottesville, Virginia, to vacate business-friendly changes the Council on Environmental Quality under former President Donald Trump made to the regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act that they say would reduce public input on major projects like pipelines and highways. The Biden administration has asked the judge to remand the 2020 rule revising the regulations to the council for review, but the plaintiffs oppose that scenario and say the rule must be vacated altogether.
How this Foley litigator became a viral TikTok chef
For one Foley & Lardner partner, fame is coming not in the courtroom but in the kitchen as a TikTok star and author of the food blog "The Korean Vegan."
Joanne Molinaro, a litigator in Chicago, has amassed more than 2.2 million followers on TikTok and hundreds of thousands more on Instagram and Twitter thanks to her posts of videos with stimulating audio of food being chopped or sizzling in a pan with soft classical music playing in the background. In each video, Molinaro tells a story, sometimes about her Korean heritage, and doles out life lessons to her followers.
While Molinaro has been posting food content and recipes for over five years, she began posting those aesthetically pleasing videos on TikTok amid the pandemic. Whenever she had spare time after work, she'd spend a few hours creating her videos. As a litigator, Molinaro is too busy to post every day and will step away for a few weeks at a time if she’s working on a particularly busy case.
When her page began getting attention, she was nervous about her newfound social media fame getting in the way of her job. "I was worried that it would make me look not serious enough, but it was actually the opposite," she told The Daily Docket. "I received emails from my clients, especially women clients, who just felt it was awesome."
She said her partners at Foley have been supportive of her social media fame. She recently signed a deal with United Talent Agency and has a cookbook that is set to be released later this year.
"To be candid here, some of the folks on this Zoom call have been found to have engaged in extortionate efforts to get a settlement approved by withdrawing their objections. I'm not putting Mr. Frank in that boat. Let's be clear. He may be a serial objector but he’s not an extortionist."
David Balser of King & Spalding, in answering a question from U.S. Circuit Judge Beverly Martin about the tactics of class action objectors during arguments before the 11th Circuit over whether it should uphold the approval of a $380.5 million class action settlement resolving consumer claims arising out of Equifax's massive data breach in 2017. The objectors to the deal include the prominent class action watchdog Ted Frank of the Center for Class Action Fairness at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, who argued the settlement fails to account for the difference between class members from different states. (Alison Frankel's On the Case)
In the courts
- Lawyers for the operators of the Dakota Access oil pipeline in a filing told U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in D.C. that the shutdown of the system sought by several local tribes would be even more harmful than previously anticipated. The filing by a unit of Energy Transfer and lawyers led by Gibson Dunn's William Scherman came as North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem sought to intervene in the case on the grounds that the state’s interests in keeping the line running are no longer adequately represented under the Biden administration. (Reuters)
- Women who sued Johnson & Johnson claiming they developed ovarian cancer as a result of asbestos in the company's Baby Powder and other talc products are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to decline to review the $2.12 billion award they won from the company in Missouri. J&J denies that its talc products can cause cancer. The plaintiffs' lawyers before the top court include Ken Starr, the former independent counsel during the Clinton administration now at the Lanier Law Firm, and Thomas Goldstein of Goldstein & Russell. (Reuters)
- The 9th Circuit agreed to rehear on an en banc basis Wells Fargo's bid to end a case by Oakland, California, seeking damages for lost property tax revenue, which the city said was caused by the bank's discriminatory mortgage lending practices that violated the Fair Housing Act. Robert Peck of the Center for Constitutional Litigation and Neal Katyal of Hogan Lovells are representing the city and bank, respectively. (Reuters)
- A divided 9th Circuit panel reinstated Navy contractor Ironhawk Technologies' claims that Dropbox's Smart Sync feature infringes its trademark in a feature of the same name. Keith Wesley, a lawyer at Browne George Ross who repped Ironhawk alongside former U.S. Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, said the court "reiterated its commitment to the reverse confusion doctrine and the protection of trademark rights of brands of all shapes and sizes." Beth Brinkmann of Covington & Burling argued the case for Dropbox. (Reuters)
- The Daily Mail's owner sued Google, alleging that the search and advertising giant’s power over selling online ad space means newspapers see little of the revenue their content produces. The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court by lawyers led by Kellogg Hansen's John Thorne raised allegations similar to those in a lawsuit by a group of states led by Texas. (Reuters)
- Two Fiat Chrysler senior managers in Italy were indicted in federal court in Detroit in connection with the ongoing probe into diesel emissions cheating at the Italian-American automaker. The charges against Sergio Pasini and Gianluca Sabbioni came after Fiat in 2019 agreed to an $800 million settlement to resolve civil claims that it used illegal software that produced false results on diesel-emissions tests in more than 100,000 U.S. vehicles. (Reuters)
Industry moves
- Matthew Levine, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who went on to serve as the first executive deputy superintendent for enforcement for the New York State Department of Financial Services, has joined Phillips Nizer. He was previously at the compliance and consulting firm Guidepost Solutions, where he was the president of its financial and regulatory compliance services practice. (Phillips Nizer)
- Robert Kamerschen, the former general counsel of the retailer Aaron's, has joined Greenberg Traurig as a shareholder in its Atlanta office. The law firm said it had counted Aaron’s as a client. Before joining Aaron's, Kamerschen was the general counsel of the credit reporting agency Equifax. (Greenberg Traurig)
- Paul Harner, who had been the partner in charge of Ballard Spahr's restructuring practice in New York, has joined Sheppard Mullin as a partner as that firm looks to beef up its finance and bankruptcy practice. He has previously taken part in Chapter 11 cases involving American Airlines, Six Flags Entertainment, Nextel and Kmart. (Reuters)
- Daniel Tristan, who has experience advising companies on financings and lending, particularly in the energy sector, has joined Shearman & Sterling as a partner in Houston and will lead the firm's Texas finance team. He was previously with Baker Botts. (Shearman)
- Real estate attorney Gary Ogden has joined Hinshaw & Culbertson as a partner in Los Angeles. He was most recently the principal of The Ogden Law Group, a real estate transactions legal advisory firm. (Hinshaw)
- Sidley Austin is adding two new partners to its employee benefits and executive compensation practice: David Mollo-Christensen, who was previously counsel at Davis Polk & Wardwell, and Eric Wolf, who had been a counsel at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. (Sidley Austin)
- Commercial litigator Corey Lee has joined Jones Day as a partner in its business and tort litigation practice in Cleveland. He was previously a partner in Hunton Andrews Kurth's Miami office. (Jones Day)
- David Elkanich, who focuses on legal ethics and advises lawyers and law firms, has joined Buchalter's office in Portland, Oregon, to chair its newly-launched professional responsibility practice group. He was previously with Holland & Knight. (Buchalter)
 Bill Barr should take a page from former AGs in writing a book (minus the hookers). After months of speculation about Bill Barr's next move, the former U.S. attorney general apparently has landed a book deal. Jenna Greene writes that if the book comes to pass - Politico cited three unnamed sources confirming the deal - Barr will join the ranks of other AGs who have penned their memoirs, including John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and Richard Thornburgh. There's also Eric Holder's autobiography that was announced in 2016 but now has been bumped to February 2024. Among the lessons gleaned? Go easy on the humblebragging and spare us any party-boy details. Read about other juicy details from former AGs' books.
 Pilgrim's Pride shareholders took too long to file amended complaint - Colorado judge. Poultry company Pilgrim's Pride persuaded U.S. District Judge Brooke Jackson of Denver to dismiss a proposed class action alleging it misled investors about its participation in a price fixing scheme. Alison Frankel writes that the judge's ruling was based on the conclusion that the shareholders filed their amended complaint in the long-running case outside of the five-year statute of repose for securities fraud claims. "No securities plaintiff may sit on the sidelines indefinitely without consequence," the company's defense lawyers at Weil Gotshal wrote in a motion seeking the case's dismissal. See why the case was according to the judge filed too late.
Check out other recent pieces from all our columnists: Alison Frankel, Jenna Greene and Hassan Kanu.
Lawyer speak: Key issues for government contractors in a new age of antitrust enforcement
Driven by the new Biden administration's focus on enforcement and compliance, antitrust issues have been thrust into limelight. Government officials have recently said that antitrust has been neglected for too long especially because of the major impact it has on businesses' growth and operation plans. Sheppard Mullin's John Carroll in a recent article discusses the implications of increased antitrust scrutiny on government contractors, who often work in competitive industries. Read more.
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