The U.S. law firm of Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP announced that Jordan D. Shea has joined the firm as a partner in the Product Liability practice in Chicago.

In a release, the firm said Shea has experience in successfully representing domestic and international companies across a wide range of industries in product liability, labor and employment, commercial and toxic tort matters in courts across the Midwest.

Previously a partner with Williams Montgomery & John, Shea represents companies in high-stakes litigation across a range of industry sectors, including aviation, lawn and farm equipment, power tools and consumer household goods. He has employment litigation experience as well and has also successfully defended manufacturers in toxic tort cases. He is a certified Cook County arbitrator and regularly conducts arbitrations.

He served as a member of the legal team that secured one of the largest ever False Claims Act settlements in a case in which the government did not intervene.

A native of Chicago, Shea received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Loyola University Chicago School of Law and his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Nine law firms face civil claims they aided and abetted a multimillion-dollar securities scam run by convicted fraudster Robert Shapiro through the now-defunct real estate investment firm Woodbridge Group of Cos., according to a Courthouse News Service report.

The suit, seeking $500 million inn general damages, describes a web of collusion with Woodbridge, through which Shapiro engineered a classic $1.3 billion Ponzi scheme that targeted the elderly and their retirement accounts, reports Courthouse News’ Maria Dinzeo.

Woodbridge, now in bankruptcy, is suing through its trustee.

The firms named as defendants are Halloran & Sage LLP, Robinson & Cole LLP, Finn Dixon & Herling LLP and Rome McGuigan P.C. of Connecticut; Balcomb & Green P.C. and Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP of Colorado; Bailey Cavalieri LLC of Ohio; and Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLC and Sidley Austin LLP of Illinois.

Read the Courthouse News article.

Bloomberg Law reports that Armstrong Teasdale LLP’s mandatory partner retirement policy doesn’t violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act because partners aren’t covered employees, the Eighth Circuit ruled, deciding a matter of first impression.

The court said equity partner Joseph S. von Kaenel wasn’t a firm “employee” when he was forced to retire at age 70.

The court relied on a precedential six-factor test for determining who is an employee, including whether the organization can fire the individual and set rules for the individual’s work, how much the employer supervises the work, and whether the individual shares in profits, explains Bloomberg’s Julie Steinberg.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

Legal cases concerning President Trump, his finances and his separation-of-powers disputes with Congress are arriving at the Supreme Court, and together provide both potential and challenge for the Roberts court in its aspiration to be seen as nonpartisan, reports The Washington Post.

On Dec. 13, the court will consider whether to schedule a full briefing and argument on the president’s request that it overturn a lower-court ruling giving New York prosecutors access to Trump’s tax returns and other financial records.

Authors Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow quote Walter Dellinger, who argued for President Bill Clinton before the Supreme Court:

“This will be a special moment for the independence of the judiciary and whether the hyperpartisanship that has infected so much of our culture has also infiltrated the Supreme Court.”

Read the  Post article.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has berated lawyers for big tech companies before, and now an attorney for DoorDash found himself the target, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The issue was the way the meal-delivery startup pushed its couriers into arbitration, writes the Chronicle‘s Mallory Moench.

Courthouse News Service describes an exchange Alsup had with DoorDash lawyer James Fogelman, of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher:

“Your law firm and all your firms have tried for 20 years to keep plaintiffs out of court, and you’ve gotten a lot of success in the courts,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup said. “Then someone says, ‘OK. We’ll take you to arbitration,’ and suddenly it’s not in your interest anymore. Now you’re wiggling away, trying to find a way to squirm out of your agreement.”

DoorDash had been ordered to pay more than $11 million in arbitration fees.

Read the SF Chronicle article.

Construction disputes often involve voluminous amounts of discovery, including documents in the hand of third parties, points out Matthew DeVries in Burr & Forman’s Best Practices Construction Law blog.

If the case is subject to arbitration, it is likely there will be a dispute about whether the arbitrator has the authority to compel production of third-party documents or witnesses for deposition, he writes.

DeVries discusses a case in which the 11th Circuit  concluded that Section 7 of the Federal Arbitration Act precludes all pre-hearing discovery from non-parties.

Read the article.

A recent New York case sheds some light on the use of contract clauses that cover cardinal changes in construction, according to an alert by Henry L. Goldberg for Moritt Hock & Hamroff.

The case involves a $5,320,000 subcontract for masonry on a project. In a dispute that arose during the project, the subcontractor alleged that the general contractor had interfered with its work and wrongfully deleted an excessive portion of the subcontractor’s work in material breach of the subcontract. In other words, in its defense it asserted the “cardinal change doctrine.”

“The standards for finding a cardinal change are imprecise; courts have wide discretion,” writes Goldberg. “What, in fact, is the ‘essential identify’ and ‘main purpose’ of your contract? Here, the court failed to find the subcontractor in breach for walking off the job.”

Read the article.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that employers cannot by contract shorten the statutory limitations period (i.e. the time period within which a claim must be brought) under Title VII, writes Fiona W. Ong for Shawe Rosenthal’s E-Updates.

Ong explains:

“In Logan v. MGM Grand Detroit Casino, the employee signed a job application containing a provision that established a six-month limitations period for bringing any lawsuit against the employer and that waived any applicable statutes of limitation. The employee, 216 days after her resignation, filed a charge of discrimination with the EEOC, and after she received a notice of right to sue, brought suit in federal court. The employer moved to dismiss her lawsuit because it was not timely filed within the contractual six-month period.”

Addressing the issue for the first time, the court found  that contractual limitation in Title VII cases to be unenforceable.

Read the article.

Mark Scott, a former equity partner at the law firm Locke Lord LLP, was convicted on Thursday of conspiracy to commit money laundering and bank fraud, reports FinanceFeeds.

He was one of the defendants in a lawsuit targeting individuals involved in the fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme OneCoin. Scott was suspected of laundering approximately $400 million in proceeds of OneCoin through fraudulent investment funds that he set up and operated for that purpose, writes FinanceFeeds’ Maria Nikolova.

Scott could face up to 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering and up to 30 years for conspiracy to commit bank fraud.

Read the FinanceFeeds article.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins said she plans to oppose the nomination of Sarah Pitlyk to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, citing her lack of experience, “troubling assertions” on therapies for family struggling with infertility, and stance on abortion, reports Bloomberg Law.

“Her nomination narrowly cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee after Democrats criticized her advocacy work. She was also considered “Not Qualified” by the American Bar Association,” according to Bloomberg’s Madison Alder.

Collins’ opposition alone, however, won’t be enough for Democrats to sink Pitlyk’s nomination in the full Senate.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

The ABA Journal reports that the U.S. Supreme Court is the least transparent among federal appellate-level courts, while the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at San Francisco is No. 1 for public access, according to Fix the Court, a national nonpartisan organization based in New York City.

The organization ranked courts on such points as to whether the courts provide live or same-day audio or video of oral arguments, how promptly they release calendars and opinions, how often they post press releases, and whether they have implemented judicial wellness and workplace conduct policies, the Journal‘s Debra Cassens Weiss writes.

Read the  ABA Journal article.

Several court cases in 2019 dealt with (or are still dealing with) key issues faced by parties to commercial contracts, including contracts for technology products and services, writes Eric Begun in a post for King & Fisher Law Group.

The post briefly discusses four of those cases and their corresponding issues of contract assignment, representations and warranties, and data security.

Begun’s discussion of the four cases provides take-away lessons for each.

Read the article.

Reuters is reporting that the firearms industry is on the verge on a potentially crushing wave of litigation from the victims of gun violence — in the opinion of the firearms industry, gun owners, the National Rifle Association and states that strongly back gun rights.

Those parties warned the U.S. Supreme Court of that scenario if the justices did not grant Remington Arms’ petition for review of a 2019 ruling by the Connecticut Supreme Court in a landmark gun liability case. The court denied Remington’s petition for review in the case which involves the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The Connecticut court found in the Remington case that the state’s unfair trade practices statute fits into the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act exception for laws “applicable to the sale or marketing” of firearms. That finding raises the specter of nationwide liability because many states have consumer protection statutes similar to Connecticut’s law, Remington warned.

Read the Reuters article.

An attorney who was brought on at the appellate state to represent a pro se litigant who claimed she was discriminated against by her former employer filed a brief that the Seventh Circuit found to be so bad that it ordered him to show cause why he shouldn’t be sanctioned.

Above the Law reports on the case, with a copy of the court’s opinion included. That opinion includes a stinging rebuke, including this passage:

“The patently frivolous nature of this appeal isn’t the only thing that troubles us. The hopelessness of [the plaintiff-appellant’s] cause didn’t deter her lawyer, Jordan Hoffman, from signing and submitting a bizarre appellate brief laden with assertions that have no basis in the record and arguments that have no basis in the law. In so doing, Hoffman violated Rule 28 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.”

The court also found the brief to be “chock-full of impenetrable arguments and unsupported assertions, and it is organized in ways that escape our understanding.”

Read the Above the Law article.

The 2019 Texas legislature enacted a new Property Code Section 5.152 to protect mineral and royalty owners from a certain species of fraudulent transactions perpetrated on trusting and/or naïve and/or out of state mineral owners, reports Charles Sartain in Gray Reed’s Energy & the Law blog.

The change is meant to address a scam in which someone “fronting for a company with a name similar to a reputable operator, would approach the owner with an oil and gas ‘lease’ of minerals or royalty that were already subject to an existing lease. Except that the lease was actually the sale of the mineral or royalty interest at a bargain price.”

The article lists the changes addressed by the new section.

Read the article.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a district court decision that retained jurisdiction over a breach of contract action, finding that the action did not sufficiently implicate issues of patent law and instead was simply a state law contract case for past royalties, reports McDermott Will & Emery via Lexology.

One of the parties to a case involving patents and royalties filed suit, alleging breach of contract and other equitable state law claims.

The defendant asserted counterclaims of breach of contract, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, restitution and breach of fiduciary duty. Both parties relied on diversity to establish subject matter jurisdiction.

Read the article.

D.C. Toedt III, writing in the On Contracts blog, offers some lessons for drafting representations and warranties in contracts.

He discusses a hypothetical case that involved the sale of a car, showing how the case could turn out differently, depending on whether the seller represented — or warranted — that the car was in good condition.

“If your client is being asked to represent and warrant some fact, then consider whether the client should only represent the fact, or whether the client should only warrant the fact,” Toedt writes in one of his drafting lessons.

Read the article.

A federal judge recently sent an ominous signal regarding the enforceability of cannabis contracts by issuing an order telling the parties have to show why the court should not dismiss the case, writes Samuel D. Méndez in Lane Powell’s Cannabis Law Advisor.

“The Order to Show Cause states that the contract at issue may be unenforceable under the federal Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”) because it concerns cannabis businesses, and cannabis remains an illegal substance under the CSA,” according to Méndez.

The judge wrote in the order that, although state law governs the breach of contract claim, where it is alleged that an agreement violates a federal statute, courts look to federal law.

Méndez offers some advice on drafting contracts that include a covenant that the parties agree not to raise the argument of enforceability in litigation.

Read the article.

In a vote that will flip the makeup of the New York-based appeals court, the Senate on Thursday confirmed a controversial White House lawyer to a seat on the Second Circuit, reports Courthouse News Service.

The vote means that a majority of the 13 judges on the Second Circuit have been appointed by Republican presidents. Menashi is the fifth judge President Donald Trump has appointed to the court and the fourth this year alone, according to Courthouse News’ Tim Ryan.

Menashi’s dodging of questions during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with his position in the Trump administration and his controversial writings, stirred controversy in the Senate.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had harsh words for Menashi’s nomination: “My Republican colleagues, in my view, rubber-stamped too many of these extreme, unqualified nominees – nominees, in Mr. Menashi’s case, who are almost craven.”

Read the Courthouse News article.

Jurors in Ward County, Texas, came back with a $1.9m verdict against Go Rhino Trucking, LLC.

The verdict was obtained by East Texas trial attorneys Stafford Davis and Shane McGuire, on behalf of their clients, Larry and Marjorie Young, the lawyers said in a release.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers aid that, in June of 2017, while travelling eastbound on I-20, the Youngs were struck from behind by a cement truck just as they entered Monahans, Texas.

During trial, it was revealed that Go Rhino failed to conduct pre-accident drug testing on the driver, and routinely violated federal regulations regarding post-accident drug testing of drivers, the lawyers said. It was further revealed that Go Rhino repeatedly violated its own safety policies.

The jury awarded the Youngs a total of $1,908,968.50, which included an award of $1.4m in punitive damages for gross negligence. The verdict was unanimous.