Good morning. Cooley has laid off 150 people – including 78 lawyers – as it faces down a downturn in client demand plaguing the legal industry as a whole. Plus, why law students will still scour the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, and the story of Jenner’s fee lawsuit against Sierra Leone. We’re over the hump — welcome to Thursday!
Were you forwarded this email? Subscribe here. |
Silicon Valley-founded law firm Cooley has laid off 150 U.S. employees, including 78 lawyers, amid a drop in client demand for the firm and the broader legal industry, reports David Thomas.
"Simply put, we hired more talent than we can reasonably develop, train and deploy against current and anticipated client demand," Joe Conroy, Cooley's chairman and CEO, said in a firmwide email. The firm hired aggressively to meet demand in 2020 and 2021, and a majority of the reductions came from the firm's business department, which handles M&A work, according to a person familiar with the layoffs.
Cooley isn’t the only firm seeing demand shrink: Transactional work has slowed in 2022, and the demand for legal services has dropped overall, Wells Fargo's Legal Specialty Group found earlier this month. Read more about why Cooley made the cuts. |
|
|
Access 2 x CLE webinars, the Thomson Reuters Legal Department Operations (LDO) Index report 2022, and 3 x Legal Leaders podcast episodes. |
|
|
McDermott and Cravath announced their seniority-based associate year-end bonuses, with McDermott's scale rising to $115,000 for the class of 2015 and Cravath's topping out at $105,000 for the class of 2016. (Reuters)
-
5th Circuit Judge James Ho and 11th Circuit Judge Elizabeth Branch said at an event at Yale Law they hoped to not have to follow through on a boycott of hiring the school’s students as law clerks to protest "cancel culture" on its campus, saying a "course correction" appeared to be underway. (Reuters)
-
Jenner is suing Sierra Leone in D.C. federal court to recover more than $8 million in legal fees for defending the West African country in U.S. courts and elsewhere since 2019. The Chicago-based firm’s complaint said it "vigorously represented" Sierra Leone in legal matters against an iron ore contractor pursuing claims that exposed the country to potentially $1.8 billion in damages. (Reuters)
- Two of Dechert’s top corporate lawyers, David Forti and Mark Thierfelder, will begin terms as co-chairs of the firm on July 1, taking over from Andy Levander, a white-collar litigator who has led the firm as chairman since 2011. (Reuters)
|
That’s the number of U.S. federal district courts where women judges outnumber male counterparts. The U.S. Senate expanded the number of federal district courts dominated by women judges to 10 as it voted to confirm Boies Schiller litigator Anne Nardacci to become a judge in upstate New York. The Northern District of New York will now have a three-woman majority among its five active judges. The number of district courts with a majority of life-tenured female judges in active service clocked in at two at the start of Democratic President Joe Biden's tenure. Men still dominate most of the nation's 94 district courts. Nardacci had previously called the possibility of her district flipping to majority female “historic.”
|
Class counsel in a securities fraud case against Lyft averted a potential disaster on Wednesday, after an Oakland judge warned that he would likely refuse to approve their proposed settlement with Lyft if they stuck with their plan to give leftover money to a charity that had nothing to do with securities laws. Block & Leviton and Lyft’s counsel at Latham revised the deal to deliver any undistributed funds to an investor protection fund, so the innocuous cy pres provision wouldn’t kill their settlement. But Alison Frankel writes that the kerfuffle is a cautionary tale for class action lawyers: Don’t treat cy pres payouts as an afterthought — especially if you’re in the 9th Circuit.
|
"People love rankings, and to be ranked — particularly in the legal field." |
-
Rostin Behnam, chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee on the collapse of FTX, one of the world's biggest crypto exchanges. FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, leaving an estimated one million customers and other investors facing billions of dollars in total losses. The firm's failure created a liquidity crunch that has rippled across the industry. The U.S. House Financial Services Committee also said it plans to hold a hearing this month to investigate FTX's collapse.
-
Closing arguments are slated to begin today in the criminal tax fraud trial of the Trump Organization. Relying on the testimony of Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, prosecutors have accused the company of paying the personal expenses of some executives without reporting the income and compensating them as if they were independent contractors. The company, which has pleaded not guilty, has sought to shift the blame to Weisselberg, who has pleaded guilty to tax fraud and other charges, and an outside accountant who it maintains should have blown the whistle on Weisselberg.
-
Lawyers for author Jean Carroll are due to file a brief in the D.C. Court of Appeals arguing that the laws of the District of Columbia should not shield former President Donald Trump from liability in a defamation lawsuit that Carroll filed. A 2nd Circuit panel in Manhattan in September set aside a judge's ruling that Caroll could sue Trump for defamation after he denied that he raped her. But the panel stopped short of declaring Trump immune in the lawsuit. Trump has claimed he was shielded from Carroll's lawsuit by a federal law immunizing government employees from defamation claims. The D.C. appeals court will hear oral arguments on Jan. 10.
Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
|
-
Johnson & Johnson's Janssen unit sued Amgen over its plan to market a drug for ulcerative colitis and other conditions similar to J&J's top-selling Stelara, saying in a lawsuit in Delaware federal court that it would infringe two patents. A spokesperson for Amgen said the company had no comment on the lawsuit. Attorneys from Latham and McCarter & English represent Janssen. (Reuters)
-
The 2nd Circuit revived a sex discrimination claim against the University of Connecticut by a former soccer player whose scholarship was revoked after she raised her middle finger to a television camera during a nationally broadcast championship game. The appeals court said a jury should decide whether UConn punished Noriana Radwan more harshly than male student-athletes who engaged in misconduct. (Reuters)
-
Fintech firm Block, led by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, must comply with the CFPB’s demand for information about how it handles complaints about fraud and errors on its Cash App payment platform, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim said. Kim ordered Block to turn over the documents despite Block’s claims that it was working to comply with the requests and that no court intervention was required. (Reuters)
-
U.S. shale producer Coterra Energy pleaded no contest for contaminating well water in Dimock, Pennsylvania, and will pay $16.3 million to construct a new means of water supply to its residents, the state attorney general said. The Houston-based company will also make 75 years of water bills payments for the impacted residents, who were exposed to drinking water polluted with metals and high levels of methane. (Reuters)
|
|
|
Sponsors are not involved in the creation of this newsletter or any other Reuters news content. Get Reuters News App To manage which newsletters you're subscribed to, click here.
Want to stop receiving this email? Unsubscribe here. |
|
|
|
