Buchalter announced that Ater Wynne, a full-service business law firm based in Portland, Oregon, will merge its practice into Buchalter.

In a release, Buchalter said adding Ater Wynne’s 22 attorneys in Portland, which is set to occur on Oct. 1, 2019, will bring Buchalter to approximately 300 attorneys in nine locations including Los Angeles, Napa Valley, Orange County, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, Scottsdale and Seattle. This is Buchalter’s second office in the Pacific Northwest following the opening of an office in Seattle less than two years ago. Buchalter’s Seattle office, led by Jeffrey G. Frank, has grown to 12 attorneys and recently relocated to the premier US Bank Centre in downtown Seattle.

Ater Wynne managing partner Todd A. Mitchell will become managing shareholder of the Portland office and a member of the firm’s board of directors. He will also spend time in the Seattle office. Half of the attorneys in Portland are licensed to practice in the State of Washington.

Other Ater Wynne Partners joining Buchalter as shareholders are Ernest Bootsma, L. David Connell, Akana J. Ma, Michael (Sam) J. Sandmire, Michael W. Shackelford, Gregory E. Struxness, Andrea Bartoloni, Nena Cook, Frank X. Curci, Thomas M. Karnes, Daniel P. Larsen, and John C. Ramig.

Additional Ater Wynne attorneys joining Buchalter include Jonathan Ater (partner emeritus), Steven K. Blackhurst (special counsel), Claudia K. Powers (special counsel), John M. Schultz (senior counsel), Kirk W. Smith (senior counsel), Alexandra Shulman (of counsel) and associates Robyn Bishop, Daniel Lis, and Amy Opoien.

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Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith says the way the U.S. government is treating Huawei is un-American, reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

He said China’s leading maker of networking equipment and mobile phones should be allowed to buy U.S. technology, including software from his company, according to Businessweek’s Dina Bass.

“U.S. President Donald Trump has said Huawei, run by a former Chinese army technologist, is a national security threat, and his Department of Commerce has added the company to an export blacklist scheduled to take full effect in November,” Bass writes.

Read the Bloomberg Businessweek article.

Leah M. Campbell has joined Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP’s Charlotte office as a senior attorney in the Banking and Financial Services Practice Group.

In a release, the firm said Campbell has experience representing financial services clients in federal and state courts, as well as before state regulators. Her representative litigations included FDCPA, UDAAP, and anti-money laundering claims.

More recently, Campbell has advised banking clients on regulatory compliance in technology agreements, outsourcings, and cloud services arrangements. She has also advised on cybersecurity regulatory risk and data privacy, as well as intellectual property issues in M&A transactions.

Prior to joining Bradley, Campbell served as senior counsel in the Cyber/Intellectual Property/Information Technology group for Deutsche Bank AG in New York.

Campbell received her J.D. (magna cum laude) from Tulane University School of Law and her Bachelor of Arts from The Evergreen State College.

Nine attorneys with Beaumont-based Provost Umphrey Law Firm, LLP, have earned recognition in the 2019 Texas Super Lawyers guide published by Thomson Reuters.

Firm equity partner Bryan O. Blevins Jr. has been recognized for his work representing plaintiffs injured by consumer products. Equity partners Edward D. Fisher, Joe J. Fisher II, D’Juana Parks, James E. Payne and David P. Wilson made the prestigious annual listing for their representation of plaintiffs involved in a variety of personal injury cases.

Firm attorneys Darren L. Brown and Matthew C. Matheny were also honored for their plaintiff’s personal injury work, with attorney Keith J. Hyde earning recognition for his environmental litigation practice.

When it comes to trade secrets, companies should understand that the federal government is increasingly pursuing criminal prosecution, warns Procopio partner Mindy Morton.

“Criminal prosecution of trade secrets is nothing new,” she writes in a post on the Procopio website. “Trade secrets plaintiffs should always consider whether to involve the state or federal authorities in their investigations. In the past, however, the conventional wisdom was that it was difficult to interest district attorneys or U.S. attorneys in business disputes involving trade secret theft. Now, however, the scope of the problem and the government’s renewed focus on stopping international intellectual property theft have made parallel criminal and civil investigations commonplace.”

Read the article.

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The recently signed “Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019″ creates a subchapter to Chapter 11 for small business debtors, i.e. those with no more than $2,725,625 in secured and unsecured debts combined, to address the unique issues faced by those companies in the bankruptcy process, explains Timothy J. McKeon in a post on Mintz’ website.

In addition to the creation of “subchapter V” to Chapter 11, the SBRA also makes important amendments to statutory provisions governing preference actions.

The new rule requires a debtor or trustee to consider a party’s statutory defenses “based on reasonable due diligence in the circumstances of the case and taking into account a party’s known or reasonably knowable affirmative defenses” prior to commencing an action under section 547, McKeon writes.

Read the article.

A looming legal brawl over a new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission order will trigger a fresh round of judicial scrutiny focused on the line between state and federal authority in wholesale power markets, reports E&E News.

“Power producers and state regulators last month sued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit over Order No. 841, a FERC directive that opens the door for batteries and other energy storage technologies to participate in wholesale electricity markets — even if they are behind a retail meter,” according to E&E News’ Pamela King.

She quoted Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative: “This is a big deal because potentially we’ll see whether FERC has the authority to invite distribution-level resources into the market.”

Read the article.

Zapproved has published “The Definitive Guide to Legal Hold Best Practices,” a guide to effectively preserving information for use in litigation.

The guide can be downloaded from Zapproved’s website at no charge.

It provides clear advice on recognizing trigger events and scoping preservation efforts; recommendations for how to issue, monitor, and release legal holds; analyses of common points of preservation failure; helpful checklists; and case law examples.

Download the guide.

Contract damages can be a great thing in a China contract, but only if done right, according to Dan Harris, writing in the Harris Bricken China Law Blog.

He explains that the term “contract damages” refers to a contract provision setting out the damages for breach. In the standard commercial contracts his firm writes for clients, the agreements usually include a specific damage amount for certain (but not all) violations of the contract terms.

“The only constant is that we try to make the amount as high as we can, while at the same time erring on the side of keeping it low enough so that it will actually work to scare the Chinese company into not breaching the contract,” Harris writes.

Read the article.

A legal victory for Delta Air Lines this year is unique in that it is the first time that a court has determined that a business owes no obligation of privacy to a customer because its privacy policy explicitly disclaims any type of contractual relationship between the business and its customers, writes Sunrita Sen in the Frost Brown Todd fbtTech Blog.

The case involved a breach of contract claim over the data breach suffered by the airline in 2017.

A U.S. district judge dismissed the claim, agreeing with Delta that the Airline Deregulation Act preempted the plaintiff’s breach of contract claims.

Read the article.

A recent case from the National Labor Relations Board shows that American labor law, including principles that apply to collective bargaining agreements, is not always as straight-forward as basic contract law, points out Barnes & Thornburg in a recent post.

The contract included a clause setting “longevity pay increases” for workers who reached certain tenure milestones with the company.

“The employer and union were meeting to negotiate a successor contract, and the agreement expired in the interim,” explains David J. Pryzbylski. “Once the labor agreement expired, the company ceased offering longevity pay increases on grounds that there was no agreement in effect that provided for such increases.”

The NLRB, however, found that a company generally must continue to offer employees the terms set forth under a collective bargaining agreement when it expires and while negotiations for a new contract are underway.

Read the article.

Trial attorney Barry Sorrels of Sorrels Hagood again has been recognized among the top white-collar criminal defense attorneys in Texas. He has earned selection to the prestigious Texas Super Lawyers list each year since its creation in 2003.

The firm said Sorrels has represented clients in high-profile criminal matters both at the state and federal levels. His clientele has included elected officials, business executives, professional athletes, doctors and other medical professionals facing investigations and formal charges, including fraud, corruption and other state and federal white-collar criminal offenses. He was recognized by the 2020 Best Lawyers in America, an honor Sorrels has earned since 1999. He also is consistently named to D Magazine’s Best Lawyers in Dallas listing.

He is board certified in criminal law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.

A former president of the Dallas Bar Association and the Patrick E. Higginbotham Inn of Court, Sorrels also frequently lends his criminal defense expertise to national news outlets, such as CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, TruTV and Dallas TV news stations.

Ward, Smith & Hill name partners Johnny Ward and Wesley Hill have earned the distinction of being named among the state’s Top 100 attorneys in the 2019 Texas Super Lawyers listing.

Ward and Hill also earned recognition in the Top 100 attorneys in Dallas-Fort Worth for their intellectual property litigation. In addition, name partner Bruce Smith was honored for plaintiff personal injury work, and of counsel and former federal Judge T. John Ward earned selection for intellectual property litigation. He has received that honor every year since retiring in 2011 from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

With no more than 5 percent of Texas lawyers selected each year, the Texas Super Lawyers list recognizes the state’s top attorneys based on peer nominations and extensive editorial research.

The firm said Ward, Smith & Hill has received numerous professional accolades, including a recent spot in the 2020 Best Lawyers in America listing and the 2019 legal guide IAM Patent 1000 – The World’s Leading Patent Professionals 2019, which features top global patent firms.

Dallas attorney Meloney Perry of Perry Law P.C. has been selected to the 2019 Texas Super Lawyers listing for her work in insurance coverage.

The Texas Super Lawyers list was compiled following a statewide survey of lawyers, vetting by a blue-ribbon panel of the state’s leading attorneys, and extensive editorial review. Thomson Reuters publishes the list in the October editions of Texas Monthly and Super Lawyers magazines.

Perry is an insurance defense attorney with more than 20 years of experience. She represents insurance companies in coverage disputes, bad faith and class actions. She serves as the primary regional lawyer for a major national insurance carrier and represents companies in insurance and business disputes throughout Texas, New Mexico and Colorado.

In addition to being honored by Super Lawyers, Perry earlier this year was recognized by The Best Lawyers in America. She has served in multiple leadership roles within the State Bar of Texas and is a frequent presenter at legal seminars that focus on insurance coverage, bad faith matters and the law.

Six partners with the boutique family law firm Orsinger, Nelson, Downing & Anderson, LLP, have earned a place among Texas Super Lawyers’ 2019 listing of the Top 100 attorneys in Texas, the most of any law firm in the state.

Selected to that exclusive ranking were partners Richard Orsinger, Keith Nelson, Scott Downing, Jeff Anderson, Brad LaMorgese and Lon Loveless. Messrs. Nelson, Downing, Anderson, LaMorgese and Loveless earned additional recognition among the Top 100 attorneys in Dallas-Fort Worth. San Antonio-based Mr. Orsinger was selected among the Top 50 attorneys in Central/West Texas.

Super Lawyers also named five other attorneys from the firm to its annual list of top attorneys: William Reppeto, Amber Liddell Alwais, Paul Hewett, Chris Oldner, and James Loveless. Earlier this year, Holly Rampy Baird, Porter Corrigan, Ryan Kirkham, and Taylor Mohr were named to the list of 2019 Texas Rising Stars, bringing the firm’s total attorneys recognized this year to 15.

Orsinger, Nelson, Downing and Anderson have been among the state’s top family law attorneys every year since 2003.

Josh Scala has joined Hogan Lovells’ San Francisco office as a corporate partner in the U.S. Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) Tax Practice.

Prior to joining the firm, Scala was a principal at Ernst & Young. Before that he worked as a transactional tax attorney at Arnold & Porter in Washington D.C. and San Francisco.

In a release, the firm said Scala’s practice is primarily focused on the ownership, development, and disposition of commercial real estate and related federal income tax issues. He has experience in representing both publicly traded and private REITs with respect to debt and equity capital raising activities, mergers and acquisitions, qualification requirements under the REIT tax law, and structuring transactions with developers, property owners, and institutional investors. He has also advised clients in both the real estate and private equity industries in all aspects of complex real estate development transactions, including negotiating joint venture agreements and property acquisitions, structuring ownership vehicles and transactions in a tax-efficient manner, and securing debt and equity financing.

Earlier in his career, Scala served as managing member of a private real estate development company with a focus on the development of planned communities and mixed-use urban infill projects. He also previously worked for a publicly-traded REIT with an investment focus on retail shopping malls. Scala received his JD, summa cum laude, Order of the Coif, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and graduated from Amherst College.

Barnes & Thornburg has added Richard E. Glaze Jr. as a partner in the firm’s Environmental Law Department in the Atlanta office.

The firm said Glaze represents corporations and municipalities in enforcement and compliance matters. He focuses on the defense of environmental, administrative, civil and criminal proceedings at the federal and state levels, including before the Department of Justice and local environmental, medical and pharmacy boards. Glaze is a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 4 criminal investigations division counsel and has deep experience in criminal and civil matters that come before the agency.

Glaze also focuses his practice on environmental permitting, regulatory enforcement issues, and defending fraud claims against medical providers. In addition, he has experience with a number of water and waste matters including stormwater, wastewater, hazardous waste and state Superfund sites.

Glaze is active in the local legal community and serves on the Georgia Association of Water Professionals Industrial Committee, the Atlanta Bar Association CLE Board of Trustees and is Past Chair of the Atlanta Bar Association Environmental and Toxic Tort Section board. He earned his J.D. from the University of North Carolina Law School and his B.S. from Davidson College.

Commercial litigator and intellectual property litigator and counselor Anthony Magee has launched the new firm of Magee Legal PLLC.

In a release, the firm said Magee is an Oxford-educated former English barrister, who has practiced law in Dallas since 1993. His practice encompasses complex disputes, particularly proceedings in federal courts and before the Patent Trial & Appeal Board, trademark applications in the Trademark Office and petitions at the Trademark Trial & Appeal Board.

“This was the right time for me to gain some well-deserved freedom to guide and counsel with entrepreneurs and established firms in North Texas, as well as support the legal teams at other firms in niche areas of patents, trademarks, copyrights and complex technologies,” he says.

Magee’s experience includes representing both plaintiffs and defendants in commercial litigation and patent and trademark infringement litigation in businesses and services, including telecommunications, media publishing, technology education, aviation, business management software and technologies, medical devices, tissue engineering, semiconductors and health care management systems.

The firm said he has worked in complex litigation and arbitrations relating to large-scale information technology outsourcing contracts and many other types of business disputes, including professional partnership disputes, contractual and trade secrecy disputes relating to professional sports teams, and litigation relating to real estate, commercial mortgage-backed securities, and auction rate securities.

Magee has been recognized in the prestigious legal publication The Best Lawyers in America for the past nine years. He has been named to the list of Texas Super Lawyers annually since 2013 for intellectual property litigation, has been listed among America’s Top 100 High Stakes Litigators in Northern Texas since 2018, and has been awarded Martindale’s Preeminent AV rating annually for the past 20 years. He is a Life Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Dallas Bar Foundation. He is a Past President of the William “Mac” Taylor American Inn of Court.

He was formerly a partner with the Ross IP Group, and led the intellectual property section of Gruber Hurst Johansen Hail LLP for almost a decade. Previously, he practiced for 15 years at the trial boutique of McKool Smith, PC.

Kimberly Brunelle Willis has joined Holland & Hart’s Commercial Litigation practice as of counsel in Denver.

In a release, the firm said Brunelle Willis represents clients facing high-stakes complex civil litigation in federal and state trial and appellate courts; enforcement proceedings, including with the DOJ, SEC, CFTC and state agencies; and inquiries by self-regulatory agencies, including FINRA and the NFA.

Prior to joining Holland & Hart, Brunelle Willis practiced for six years as a litigation and enforcement attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in New York. She also served as a law clerk to the Honorable William G. Young of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Brunelle Willis received her J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and earned her B.A. from Boston College. She is admitted to practice in New York and her practice in Colorado is temporarily authorized pending admission under C.R.C.P. 205.6. She is also admitted to the bars of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The company that owns a scuba dive boat that caught fire and sank off California, killing 34 people, has sought to avoid liability by invoking a 19th-century law that has shielded vessel owners from costly disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic, according to reports from Reuters and the Los Angeles Times.

“Accidents that occur on land with a similar death toll could lead to more than $100 million in damages, lawyers said,” Reuters reports. “But on the water, maritime law applies, and any lawsuits will run up against the statute invoked late on Thursday by Truth Aquatics, which allows the owner of a vessel and its insurer to escape or severely limit its liability in certain cases.”

Owners of the boat have cited an 1851 statute in asking a judge to eliminate their financial liability or lower it to an amount equal to the post-fire value of the boat, or $0. The owner of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, limited its liability in lawsuits in the United States to $92,000, which was the value of the lifeboats that survived the accident.

Read the Reuters article.