Latham to Cut 190 Associates, 250 Staff

Latham & Watkins has confirmed to The Am Law Daily that it is laying off 190 associates, or approximately 12 percent of the firm's associate base. The firm also announced cuts of 250 non-legal staff, including paralegals. The announced layoffs are the most dramatic cuts announced so far by an Am Law 100 firm.

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Brutal Week May Not Be the End of Law Firm Layoffs

Even in the darkest days of the dot-com bust earlier this decade or in the recession of the early 1990s, there was never a day like Thursday in the world of law firms.

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Some Lawyers Are Still Hot in This Cold Economy

Attorneys and legal staffers with experience in litigation, bankruptcy, foreclosures, corporate securities or patent proceedings are hot commodities in the down economy, according to a new survey of legal staffing and salaries.

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800 Law Firm Jobs Lost in One Day

Almost 800 associates and legal staff nationwide returned home jobless Thursday after eight firms conducted mass layoffs, citing an unprecedented downturn in demand.

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Obama calls $18B in Wall Street bonuses outrageous

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama says it is irresponsible and shameful for Wall Street bankers to be paid huge bonuses at a time when the American public is dealing with economic hardship.

The president reacted harshly Thursday to reports that corporate employees got paid more than $18 billion in bonuses last year.

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Attorney Charged With Stealing Millions From Guardian Accounts

A Brooklyn lawyer has been charged with stealing more than $4 million between 2001 and 2008 from guardianship bank accounts he supervised for incapacitated elderly people and children.

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Supreme Court won't revive online content law

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government has lost its final attempt to revive a federal law intended to protect children from sexual material and other objectionable content on the Internet.

The Supreme Court, in an order Wednesday, said it won't consider reviving the Child Online Protection Act, which lower federal courts struck down as unconstitutional. The law has been embroiled in court challenges since it passed in 1998 and never took effect.

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Double Victory for Criminal Defendants at the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court issued two opinions Tuesday morning, both of them striking down lower court opinions that had favored prosecutors. Over at the Sentencing Law and Policy blog, professor Doug Berman is already proclaiming that the decisions offer further proof that the Court is the "most pro-defendant appellate court in the nation on sentencing issues."

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Sheriff Put in Federal Custody After Shortchanging Inmates on Meals

A northern Alabama sheriff was in federal custody Thursday after a judge ruled he purposely fed inmates skimpy meals so he could make money from an unusual system that lets sheriffs turn a profit on their jail kitchens.

Morgan County Sheriff Greg Bartlett testified at a Wednesday court hearing that he made $212,000 over three years by cheaply feeding prisoners -- every cent of it legal under a Depression-era state law and reported on his tax forms as income.

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Study: Murders among black youths on the rise

WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of young black men and teenagers who either killed or were killed in shootings has risen at an alarming rate since 2000, a new study shows.

The study, to be released Monday by criminologists at Northeastern University in Boston, comes as FBI data is showing that murders have leveled off nationwide.

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Court Weighs How Maternity Leaves Affect Pensions

Several Supreme Court justices questioned on Wednesday whether AT&T Corp. is discriminating against former employees by paying smaller retirement checks to women who took pregnancy leaves in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Lawyer now lives among his clients

It's not unusual for a lawyer to have to meet a criminal client in a prison.

It's another thing to bump into your client because you're living in the same jail.

So it is for D. Scott Perrine, now housed at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in the Northeast. It's the same prison housing Perrine's client Pete Hopkins, 20, one of three men whose beating by Philadelphia police on May 5 was captured on an infamous video by a Fox29 news helicopter.

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Indiana Girl Sues For Chance To Play Baseball

Logan Young has been playing baseball with the boys for nine years, and she and her parents don't think that should change now that she's in high school.

The 14-year-old and her family have filed a federal lawsuit over an Indiana High School Athletic Association rule that prohibits the Bloomington South freshman from trying out for the high school baseball team because she is female.

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Innocent Man Freed After 23 Years Files Suit

A man who spent 23 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit sued St. Louis County and the officers who arrested him, saying investigators ignored inconsistencies in the victim's description.

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Opportunities emerge for law firms, even as they struggle

The global financial crisis has been hard on big law. Some firms in Atlanta and around the country are even laying off lawyers as clients cut back on service.

Amid the turmoil, Alston & Bird managing partner Richard Hays sees a promising niche in what's sure to be a confusing new financial, regulatory and legislative environment for clients.

"For law firms, that presents an opportunity," he says. "We are staying close to it."

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Supreme Court Argument Report: Lawyers as 'Repeat Players'

During argument at the Supreme Court on Monday in a confrontation clause case, the justices and attorneys engaged in some spirited exchanges concerning whether defense lawyers -- especially those "repeat attorneys" who appear often before the same judges and prosecutors -- would be likely to take undue advantage of a rule requiring forensic technicians to testify when lab reports are admitted as evidence in drug cases.

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Man with 'largest collection of infants and babies' porn gets 10 years

A Central Florida man who had a massive child-pornography collection that included victims as young as newborns was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison Wednesday.

Tony Guerra, a former food-services worker at what was then called Disney-MGM Studios, pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of receiving and distributing child pornography.

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Jury finds racism in deputy's case;

Black supervisors in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department were acting out of racism when they called a group of Latino deputies the "Mexican Mafia" and disciplined a member, jurors found Thursday.

Angel Jaimes, a 19-year veteran of the department, was harassed because of his Mexican origin by his supervisors, who, according to testimony, said the station "was run by Mexicans and they were going to change that," the panel concluded.

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Paralegal Pleads Guilty to Taking $1.7 Million From Firm

A former paralegal at a South Windsor, Conn., law firm has pleaded guilty to stealing $1.7 million from her employer to pay her gambling debts.

Patricia Baddeley-Meehan of Ellington, Conn., admitted in her plea Thursday that she took the money between 2003 and 2007 from her employers, the Berman & Russo law firm.

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Asking for Details of Workers' Illness Causes a Legal Migraine for Employers

A recent lawsuit against retail chain Dillard's Inc. is highlighting what some claim is a growing problem in the workplace: employers asking too much information about workers' illnesses when asked for sick leave.

In the Dillard's case, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claims that one California store required employees to reveal the specific nature of their illness in order to deem sick leave as an excused absence. The EEOC argues that this policy violates the Americans With Disability Act (ADA). EEOC v. Dillard's, No. 08-CV-1780 (S.D. Calif.).

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