The proposed Attorney-Client Privilege Protection Act of 2007 would prohibit the Justice Department and other federal agencies from: 1) demanding, requesting, or conditioning the treatment of a private party on the disclosure of communications protected by the attorney-client privilege or as attorney work product; and 2) taking into account when making any civil or criminal charging decision as to an organization or a person affiliated with it: a) any valid assertion of the attorney-client privilege or work-product protection; b) payment for attorneys' fees for an employee of the organization; c) a joint-defense or common-interest agreement between the organization and one of its employees; d) the sharing of information between the organization and one of its employees; or e) the organization's failure to take action adverse to an employee who has refused to cooperate with the government.

The KPMG tax shelter case brought to light heavy-handed attempts by federal prosecutors to exert economic coercion on indicted former KMPG partners and deprive them of the counsel of their choice, of resources that would otherwise be available for their defense, and of their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan's landmark decisions on motions by various defendants held many of the government's actions unlawful. <i>See United States v. Stein</i>, 488 F Supp. 2d 350 (S.D.N.Y. 2007); 435 F. Supp. 2d 330 (S.D.N.Y. 2006). But what are counsel for corporate employees to do when prosecutors attack their clients' reputation and pocketbook, but there's no judge to complain to?

Professionals are often asked to assist in the wind-down and liquidation of a company by the company's legal counsel. The requesting attorney, who may have a history with the company, knows the company is in trouble and may even expect a bankruptcy filing will come relatively soon. This in-depth article describes how to hire a wind-down specialist and what to expect.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York recently held in two related cases under Chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code involving failed hedge funds that the mere presence of a registered office in the Cayman Islands, without 'pertinent' nontransitory economic activity in the Cayman Islands, was insufficient to recognize Cayman liquidation proceedings as 'main' or 'nonmain' and therefore the court denied relief under Chapter 15. This article offers commentary and practice points relating to Chapter 15 and these cases.

Imagine you are an equipment manufacturer. You sell $45 million in goods to a reliable customer on credit, shipping them to a third-party warehouse to be held for the customer to pick up when needed. Months later, unable to pay and sliding toward bankruptcy, the customer returns the unused equipment. The next thing you know, the customer, having filed for bankruptcy, sues you to recover not only the $45 million value of the returned equipment, but also an additional $55 million in cash payments the customer had made.That is exactly the situation Nortel Networks Inc. ('Nortel') recently faced ... Part One of this article discusses some of the many novel legal issues relating to prepetition equipment returns that arose in the Nortel case.

Over the last several decades, scientific advances have made it possible for a living person to parent a child using a deceased partner's frozen sperm, eggs or a previously fertilized and subsequently frozen embryo or pre-embryo. The scarce case law as well as the statutory law in the several states of this country are ill-equipped to deal with the myriad issues this new technology presents.

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Family law attorneys are urging couples to steer clear of Internet-ordained ministers when seeking an officiate to perform their nuptials. Their warnings follow a recent Pennsylvania court decision in which a judge declared a marriage invalid because the couple had been married by an Internet-ordained minister. The court ruled that the officiate was unauthorized under state law to perform a wedding.

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction aims to protect children from being wrongfully removal or retained in a country other than their own and to establish procedures to ensure their prompt return to their country of habitual residence. Laudable though these goals are, they are subject to the nuances of the interpretations given to the law in the numerous courts around the world. How the courts of this and other countries deal with the various aspects of the Hague Convention can be cause for confusion even for experts in the field, let alone for the attorney who deals with very few of these cases.