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The Eighteenth Annual Conference & Workshops on Law Firm Management & Economics will be held in New Orleans, LA on March 17 and 18, 2005 at the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel.
In conducting strategic planning studies and facilitating numerous strategic planning retreats, I regularly discuss long-term trends affecting law firms with dozens of members of executive committees and managing partners. These trends of interest differ somewhat, of course, for firms of different sizes. More importantly, sometimes the same trend has very different implications for firms of different sizes.
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Lawyers who prevail in a civil rights case but win only nominal damages are generally not entitled to attorney fees, the Court of Appeals has ruled in a groundbreaking opinion.
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It only seems fair for the in-house department to strive to simplify the billing process at a time when it is demanding so much from outside counsel.
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Three more Philadelphia law firms have joined in the parade to raise starting salaries. Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin and Saul Ewing both moved their starting wage from $105,000 to $115,000, and Fox Rothschild is jacking its rate from $100,000 to $110,000.
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National rulings of interest to you and your practice.
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Suppose a group of officers of one of your foreign-based corporate clients, with no offices or businesses in the United States, makes a rare visit to the U.S. for an industry-related conference. Between sessions, they break off to participate in a conference call with employees overseas. The subject is whether to authorize political contributions in another country in the hope of getting business there, and they tell their compatriots to proceed. As soon as the conference is over, they head home. Can this one call be the basis for an assertion of U.S. jurisdiction over your client and the officers under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, in spite of the entirely accidental nature of the contact.
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White-collar defense attorneys face many challenges to overcome in successfully representing their clients. In federal criminal cases, the challenges have increased dramatically due to the heightened punishments that can be assessed against "non-cooperating" individuals or businesses who insist upon their rights to a trial. Consider the recent case of Jamie Olis, a mid-level accountant at an energy company, who (unlike two of his superiors) went to trial and was convicted of various fraud charges for having engaged in "income-smoothing" or "cookie-jar accounting" of the company's earnings history to try to help the company meet its earnings expectations. Although Olis received no financial benefit for his misguided efforts, he got 24 years' imprisonment (compared with his cooperative bosses, whose sentences were capped at a 5-year maximum under plea agreements). The sentence was largely due to the calculations of the "amount of loss."
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The Problem: You are the CEO of a publicly traded company that has been rocked by a highly publicized scandal. When the story first broke, your General Counsel told you that the company had to hire an outside law firm to conduct an internal investigation. She also told you that the report of the internal review might have to be turned over to DOJ and the SEC if those agencies insisted on having a copy. You worried about whether plaintiffs in the inevitable shareholder lawsuits would claim that they, too, were entitled to copies of the report, but you deferred to the judgment of your General Counsel and authorized the internal review. Now a new issue has arisen. Long before DOJ or the SEC asks for the results of the internal investigation, and well before a single shareholder suit is filed, your General Counsel gets a call from your company's outside auditor saying that they want a copy of the internal review. You ask your General Counsel whether providing the report to your auditor will waive its privileged status. She says the answer probably is "no." Is your General Counsel right?