Pacific Gas and Electric Co. paid at least $84 million to four outside law firms in the year leading up to its January bankruptcy filing, court papers show, demonstrating how the embattled utility’s legal bills piled up as its challenges also mounted, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The vast majority of the total legal payments — $75.7 million — went to Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a New York firm that is PG&E’s lead coordinating counsel in wildfire-related matters,” writes the Chronicle‘s J.D. Morris.

The company paid Weil, Gotshal & Manges $4.7 million in the 90 days leading up to the company’s bankruptcy filing. The other firms receiving revenue from the case are Jenner & Block and Keller & Benvenutti.

“Given the importance of these issues to the board, they wanted to hire the best. And the best are very expensive,” said Jared Ellias, a UC Hastings associate law professor. “… But man, that is a lot of money.”

Read the Chronicle article.

Bloomberg Law is reporting that the attorneys who won a major court ruling this month invalidating some caps on pay for NCAA college athletes are seeking nearly $45 million for their work on the case.

The attorneys are from the law firms Winston & Strawn, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, Pritzker Levine LLP, and Pearson, Simon & Warshaw, according to Bloomberg’s Mike Leonard.

The request is based on fees of almost $30 million for hours spent on the complex antitrust class action, multiplied by 1.5 to reflect the case’s degree of difficulty and risk, according to the fee motion filed March 26 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

A U.S. district judge has ordered Pepper Hamilton LLP to turn over materials tied to the law firm’s 2015-16 investigation that led Baylor University regents to report the school had fundamentally failed in its Title IX implementation duties, reports the Waco Tribune-Herald.

“The significance is we are continuing to get to the bottom of who, what, where and when in regard to the failures at Baylor,” said Jim Dunnam, a Waco attorney who represent the 15 plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers had filed for a subpoena in March 2017 seeking materials from Pepper Hamilton and in June filed a motion to compel the firm to comply, but the firm did not respond to the request, according to the Tribune-Herald‘s Phillip Ericksen.

Read the Tribune-Herald article.

Recent court decisions are making it easier for private litigants who believe they have been underpaid royalties under an oil-and-gas lease to ratchet up the pressure on operators by styling their complaints as putative class actions, writes Thomas G. Ciarlone Jr. for Kane Russell Coleman Logan’s Energy Law Today.

“This has the obvious potential to transform nuisance-value lawsuits into headline-making disputes that can involve thousands of lessors seeking a bigger piece of the pie from the working interest,” he explains.

“There could be trouble ahead for operators if the future of royalty disputes lies increasingly within the province of states’ attorneys (with broad powers and vast resources) operating under the auspices of consumer protection laws,” Ciarlone concludes.

Read the article.

There are circumstances that allow a departing employee to challenge the legitimacy of a non-compete agreement, even if this type of contract meets all the legal requirements, writes Romy Jurado of Jurado & Farshchian.

In her article, she discusses two questions that arise when an employee challenges a non-compete: Should an employee actually challenge the agreement? And: How exactly does an employee challenge it?

She also discusses the three basic approaches an employee might take to challenge the agreement: Ignoring it; negotiating with the employer; and filing a declaratory judgment action.

Read the article.

High Performance Counsel will kick off its #ThinkTank series with the first quarterly briefing on the state of the legal industry  on April 12, 2019.

Faculty members recruited by the company will share their thoughts on just three questions – each designed to elicit actionable intelligence to equip the modern legal professional navigating the marketplace.

“We’ve created #ThinkTank to be a critical sounding board for those looking ahead – and looking to get ahead – in the modern legal industry,” the company says on its website. “Our annual #ThinkTank membership program provides exclusive access to #hipcounsel events, including our State of the Legal Industry Quarterly Briefings and Members Only published insights.”

Register for #ThinkTank.

Kim Stanger, writing for Holland & Hart, offers a brief summary of some terms or issues that should be considered in provider agreements.

The article discusses such topics as regulatory compliance, written agreements, parties, the nature of relationships, services, schedules, location, independence, intellectual property, use of information, outside activities, qualifications, representations and warranties, performance standards, medical records, employer obligations, compensation, bonuses, benefits, exempt status, referrals, assignment of fees, liability insurance, and more.

Read the article.

Nothing is more fundamental to private equity deal practice than limiting the exposure of private equity sellers for post-closing claims, writes Glenn D. West for Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP’s Global Private Equity Watch.

He believes that exposure to the discussion of fraud allegations, “whether though extra-contractual fraud claims (because of ineffective anti-reliance clauses or undefined fraud carve-outs), or claims based on less than deliberate and knowing misrepresentations (by the private equity seller itself) regarding the express, bargained-for representations set forth in the acquisition agreement (as a result of undefined fraud carve-outs), requires the most vigilance to avoid.”

Read the article.

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Wells Fargo general counsel C. Allen Parker will take over as interim president and chief executive of the company after the abrupt departure of chief executive Tim Sloan on Thursday.

Sloan had spent more than two years trying without success to convince lawmakers and regulators that the embattled bank is no longer a threat to its customers, according to Renae Merle of The Washington Post.

“Sloan spent more than two years on an countrywide apology tour after Wells Fargo acknowledged a pattern of consumer abuses — from opening millions of fraudulent accounts on behalf of its customers without their consent to mistakenly foreclosing on hundreds of clients and repossessing the cars of thousands of others. Sloan’s pleas often failed to win over frustrated lawmakers,” Merle writes.

Read the Post article.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the former general counsel of the Houston Housing Authority won $1.87 million in a lawsuit against the agency after she accused it of retaliation.

“Karen Miniex, the former general counsel for the agency, alleged her boss at the housing agency retaliated against her after she investigated fraud in the agency’s voucher program targeted at veterans,” according to the report. “The trial was held before U.S. District Judge Nancy F. Atlas.”

A statement from the agency said an appeal is being considered, should the judge uphold the jury’s verdict.

Read the Houston Chronicle article.

A former lawyer with Hunton & Williams has been awarded $6.3 million for a brain injury caused when she hit her head on a low-hanging pipe in the Atlanta parking garage used by people at the law firm, reports the ABA Journal.

Aja Diamond McCoy was a lawyer at the firm now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth when she suffered the injury.

Jurors awarded her $8 million, but McCoy was deemed to be partially at fault, reducing the award to $6.3 million. She suffers from “unpredictable and severe” pain from the 2013 injury.

Read the ABA Journal article.

A Washington, D.C. federal judge entered a $353 million default judgment March 23 against Iran for its role in the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, according to the plaintiffs’ law firm, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp.

The commercial airliner was hijacked in 1985 shortly after takeoff from Athens, Greece, headed to Rome, and then on to Boston and Los Angeles, with 139 passengers aboard, most of whom were Americans. The lawsuit, filed by 108 passengers and family members, was filed under a 2008 statute creating a federal cause of action against foreign states designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism for supporting terrorist attacks. Iran was added to the list in 1984, based on its support for a campaign of terrorist hijackings, bombings and kidnappings largely aimed at American citizens.

On June 14, 1985, terrorists from the Iranian-financed terrorist group Hezbollah boarded TWA Flight 847, posing as passengers, while heavily armed with guns, hand grenades and other explosives. When the aircraft reached cruising altitude, they stood up and ran down the aisle, threatening to blow up the aircraft unless Israel released 700 imprisoned Shiite Muslims. The plane was diverted to Beirut, Lebanon for refueling. The hijackers then ordered the plane to fly back and forth between Beirut and Algiers, Algeria for the next three days, releasing small groups of mostly women and children along the way. On the second stop in Beirut, airport authorities turned out the lights and blocked the runways, nearly forcing a crash landing.

During the flight, passengers were beaten, made to hold torturously painful positions for hours, and subjected to mock executions. In Beirut, the terrorists killed Navy diver Robert Stethem, dumping his body on the tarmac. Family members could only imagine the worst, having no way of knowing the fate of their loved ones. Then, 39 male passengers were taken into Beirut, where they were held for several more weeks until Israel agreed to satisfy some of the terrorists’ demands by releasing prisoners held in Israel and Kuwait.

The lawsuit centered on evidence that Iran financed, supported, trained, and guided Hezbollah for the purpose of using terrorist attacks to promote a largely anti-Semitic and anti-American agenda. The U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act affords plaintiffs the ability to sue a foreign country for damages caused by its sponsorship of terrorist attacks. Similar lawsuits against Iran, Sudan, Syria and North Korea have resulted in judgments for compensatory damages totaling billions of dollars.

In his order granting plaintiffs’ motion for entry of default judgment, District Court Judge Richard Leon noted that the victims’ declarations “paint a harrowing tale of the events that transpired aboard TWA Flight 847.”

“These families have lived with the trauma of the hijacking for over 30 years with little hope of getting closure,” said plaintiffs’ counsel Mark N. Bravin, partner at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP (MSK). “They have now succeeded in holding Iran accountable in a court of law for its role in the hijacking and are entitled to the damages awarded by the court.”

Each of the 108 plaintiffs will be eligible to seek partial payment of their judgments from the U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund. Congress created the Fund in December 2015 to address the difficulties American victims have encountered when trying to enforce court judgments against the foreign states that sponsor terrorist attacks.

“The District Court’s decision acknowledges the significant physical and emotional trauma our clients suffered and will enable them to collect at least a portion of the damages awarded to them by the court,” added Bravin.

The case is Allan, et. al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran, Civil Action No. 1:17-cv-00338, United States District Court for the District of Columbia. In addition to Bravin, plaintiffs were represented by Theresa Bowman and Matthew Williams, also of MSK.

To get around the unilateral character of adhesive contracting, U.S. courts have, over the past five decades, refocused contract formation on constructive notice, points out Henry Allen Blair in Arbitration Nation.

“If a reasonable person in the position of the recipient of boilerplate should have seen the terms, the recipient will be bound by those terms, regardless of whether she ever actually read or understood the them. Constructive awareness coupled with an individual purchasing something from a commercial party amounts to assent,” he adds.

The article discusses Starke v. SquareTrade, Inc., in which the Second Circuit concluded that the a purchaser of a consumer product protection plan did not have reasonable notice of an arbitration provision contained in the terms and conditions communicated via a hyperlink in a post-sale email.

Read the article.

Robin O has joined Harrity & Harrity, LLP as an associate, the firm announced in a release.

O is a patent lawyer who focuses on electrical and computer technologies, including telecommunications, computer hardware and software, telematics, data analytics, networking devices, medical devices, and business methods.

“Robin has the unique experience of having worked both in law firms and in-house,” said Harrity & Harrity managing partner John Harrity. “Having been involved in software and business method related inventions for much of his career, I am certain that our clients will benefit from Robin’s experience.”

Prior to joining Harrity & Harrity, O practiced in-house at Allstate Insurance Company. He started his legal career as a patent agent at Miller, Matthias & Hull. He earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his J.D. from the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Chamberlain Hrdlicka announced that it has elevated four new shareholders. Atlanta-based attorneys Erica Opitz and Chris Steele, Houston-based attorney Justice David Medina and Philadelphia-based attorney Kevin Sweeney were named shareholders.

“Each of these attorneys have contributed significantly to the success of our firm through their hard work and dedication to providing great client service,” said Wayne Risoli, the firm’s managing shareholder. “The number of attorneys joining our shareholder ranks this year is a testament to our continued growth and commitment to achieving excellent results for our clients. We are confident that their leadership will bring continued success to Chamberlain Hrdlicka.”

Erica Opitz
Opitz focuses her practice on corporate, securities and finance and often serves as outside general counsel to her clients. She counsels start-ups and corporate clients on a variety of financial transactions including mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, capital raises, real estate transactions and loans. Opitz earned her undergraduate degree from Binghamton University and her law degree from Mercer University School of Law.

Christopher Steele
Steele’s practice focuses on trusts and estates, where he handles estate and asset protection planning as well as the administration of complex trusts and estates. He has experience in counseling clients on issues relating to complex wills, revocable and irrevocable trusts, grantor trusts, life insurance planning and complex gifting techniques. He earned his undergraduate degree from Georgia State University, his law degree from Mercer University School of Law and a Master of Laws degree in taxation from the University of Florida.

Justice David M. Medina
Medina works with clients in multiple industries on various trials, business transactions and appeals. Justice Medina previously served on the Texas Supreme Court and authored over 90 Supreme Court Opinions. He earned his undergraduate degree from Texas State University, his law degree from South Texas College of Law and his Master of Laws degree in global energy, international arbitration and environmental law from the University of Texas.

Kevin Sweeney
Sweeney works with clients involved in civil and criminal tax controversy and litigation matters. He focuses on high-stakes IRS audits, civil tax litigation, white-collar criminal defense matters and corporate investigations for high and ultra-high net worth individuals, business owners and public and private companies worldwide. He earned his undergraduate degree from Loyola University and his law degree from New York Law School.

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A federal judge in New York will hear oral arguments next week in a lawsuit brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that seeks to hold Tesla CEO Elon Musk in contempt for violating a settlement deal, according to a CNN report.

Judge Alison Nathan will consider the SEC’s request that Musk be held in contempt for violating a settlement agreement reached last year, which required he get pre-approval for social media posts about the electric car company, writes CNN’s Victoria Cavaliere.

Musk tweeted on Feb. 19 that Tesla would produce “around 500k [cars] in 2019.” Hours later, he posted a follow-up tweet indicating that the company will actually deliver just 400,000 cars this year.

Although Musk corrected his mistake, regulators said he had “once again published inaccurate and material information about Tesla to his over 24 million Twitter followers,” according to court papers.

Read the CNN article.

Stacia Hollinshead, a 30-year-old assistant state’s attorney from DeKalb County, Ill., was murdered in Wisconsin, and her ex-husband has been arrested.

The Daily Chronicle of DeKalb, Ill., reports that Hollinshead, who is a mother of one and a graduate of Northern Illinois University’s Law School, was pronounced dead at the scene, in her parents’ house in Wisconsin.

Police arrested her ex-husband, Ulisses Medina Espinoza, in connection with the murder. Hollinshead had sought a protective court order to keep Medina Espinosa away from her, citing a pattern of verbal and digital harassment.

The report quotes Mark Cordes, interim dean and professor of law at NIU’s College of Law: “Stacia had tremendous potential as a lawyer and a very bright future ahead of herself. She was the type of graduate that makes our school very proud.”

Read the Daily Chronicle article.

Bloomberg Law is reporting that a Washington, D.C., attorney is in criminal contempt of court for refusing to answer questions about where his client’s assets could be found, the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed March 26.

The court found that Matthew LeFande disregarded oral and written orders to answer questions on the witness stand by the magistrate judge in the underlying case. That underlying litigation began when LeFande’s client sold a property through a real estate settlement company, and the company mistakenly transferred almost $300,000 back to her instead of to her mortgage lender.

At a status conference, the magistrate judge ordered LeFande to answer questions, but he refused, asserting attorney-client and Fifth Amendment privileges, writes Bloomberg’s Martina Barash.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

The Russian election interference report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, still not fully disclosed, is raising a number of questions and also surprised some who practice criminal law, according to a report by Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

“It is perhaps somewhat surprising that Mr. Mueller didn’t provide a conclusion on the issue of obstruction of justice. Certainly, many Americans were expecting a clear-cut decision,” said Philip Hilder, a former U.S. prosecutor in Houston who now is a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at Hilder & Associates, P.C.

“But proving either conspiracy or obstruction is a difficult challenge. Until the portion of the actual Mueller report is disclosed articulating his rationale, I could only speculate as to why there is no solid conclusion after a two-year investigation.

“Perhaps more surprising is that Attorney General William Barr concluded after only 48 hours of review that the investigation is not sufficient to establish that the president obstructed justice. Assuming the bulk of the report itself is released, a fuller picture will come into focus as to why Mueller demurred and whether Mr. Barr’s conclusion is justified,” said Hilder who has represented whistleblowers and other defendants in high-profile trials.

“As to how much of the report and grand jury testimony should be turned over to Congress, it is reasonable to assume that a large portion is based on grand jury material. A court order is needed to release that information. A blanket release requested by Congress may not be possible, since there may be evidence disclosed that is related to ongoing investigations by other federal prosecutors as well criminal prosecutions already indicted by the Mueller team. Nonetheless, it may take a while until all the grand jury material is scrutinized before its possible release. I would anticipate rolling production, with Congress receiving parts of the report over time.”