Miller & Chevalier Chartered announced that the firm elected two new members. Michael J. Satin and Addy R. Schmitt practice in the areas of white collar defense and complex civil litigation.

“We are pleased to welcome Michael and Addy to the firm’s Membership,” said Anthony F. Shelley, Chair of Miller & Chevalier. “Both lawyers have made significant contributions to the success of the firm and to the Litigation department specifically. Their experience supports our strategic growth as they help to resolve matters on behalf of our global clients.”

The firm’s release continues:

Michael J. Satin’s practice focuses on white collar defense and complex civil litigation. He is an experienced trial lawyer who has been lead counsel in dozens of jury trials. He has also argued before the D.C. Circuit and the D.C. Court of Appeals. In addition to his trial and appellate work, Mr. Satin has conducted internal investigations into alleged violations of U.S. laws and regulations, including the False Claims Act (FCA) and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). As a result of his core practice areas, Mr. Satin has particular experience advising clients in the complexities arising for clients who face potential parallel civil and criminal proceedings. Prior to joining Miller & Chevalier, Mr. Satin worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS), where he represented indigent defendants charged with serious criminal offenses. As the training director during his final three years at PDS, he designed and implemented a yearly ten-week training program for incoming attorneys. He continues to teach trial advocacy to practitioners and students. Satin holds a J.D., cum laude, from Cornell Law School and a B.A., magna cum laude, from Brown University.

Addy R. Schmitt practices in the areas of criminal and civil litigation. Before joining Miller & Chevalier, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, where she represented federal executive agencies and employees at all stages of litigation in matters pending before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Schmitt also served as counsel and career law clerk to the Hon. Emmet G. Sullivan on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and as a staff assistant in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), as well as a lobbyist for a large national non-profit organization. Schmitt teaches Criminal Trial Advocacy as an Adjunct Professor at American University Washington College of Law and is an active member of the local legal community, including serving on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s Committee on Grievances and chairing the Superior Court of the District of Columbia’s Magistrate Judge Advisory Merit Selection Panel. Schmitt holds a J.D., summa cum laude, from American University Washington College of Law and a B.A. from Georgetown University.

“Michael and Addy’s successful efforts on behalf of our clients make them wonderful additions to the firm’s Membership,” said Mark Rochon, Chair of the firm’s Litigation Department. “These two talented lawyers have specific experience in the various types of criminal and civil litigation matters that often entangle our clients.”

William (Bill) Regan has joined Hogan Lovells’ New York office as partner in the Litigation and Arbitration practice group.

Regan represents banks, issuers, and senior executives in securities class actions and banking litigation matters. He also advises clients on regulatory matters, including investigations and enforcement proceedings brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

“Bill brings skills, energy, and experience that will contribute to the growth of our financial institutions and securities litigation offerings,” said Dennis Tracey, Head of Litigation for the Americas. “The addition of Bill to our practice is part of an ongoing growth trend in the demands of our global client base for strong U.S. securities and financial services expertise.”

“New York is a key jurisdiction for our clients in the securities sector, and the addition of Bill highlights our investment in strong talent” said Oliver Armas, Managing Partner of the firm’s New York office. “He will help us serve non-U.S. firms that trade on U.S. exchanges which require local counsel in New York as well as their own jurisdictions.”

Regan earned his J.D. from the George Washington University Law School, and his B.A. from Hofstra University.

A lawyer for Sam and Dee Wyly said Thursday that the tax evasion and tax fraud case brought by the Internal Revenue Service in the Northern District of Texas is nothing more than “a bunch of sound bites” and allegations that are not based in federal tax law, reports The Dallas Morning News.

“The IRS’ lawyer countered that the evidence presented during the past four weeks of an unprecedented billion-dollar bankruptcy trial shows that the Wylys ‘never intended to pay taxes’ on the hundreds of millions of dollars they kept in offshore trusts on the Isle of Man,” the report continues.

The bankruptcy judge hearing the case is expected to take several weeks to rule in the complex bankruptcy trial in which the IRS accused Sam Wyly and Charles Wyly’s widow, Dee Wyly, of tax evasion and fraud and is seeking $2.2 billion in back taxes, fees and penalties.

Read the story.

Stephen Diaco, one of three lawyers accused of setting up a rival’s DUI arrest, was permanently disbarred Thursday by the Florida Supreme Court, reports The Tampa Tribune.

The case began with a civil lawsuit in which Diaco and two other lawyers represented a radio personality who was the defendant in a slander suit. “But during the trial, [the plaintiff’s] lawyer, C. Phillip Campbell, was arrested for DUI. The state bar accused the Diaco firm of orchestrating the arrest by having a paralegal ply Campbell with liquor and then trick him into moving her car when a friend on the Tampa Police Department was waiting to catch him,” The Tribune reports.

The two other lawyers remain temporarily suspended.

Read the article.

A federal jury in New Hampshire ordered Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to pay $31.22 million to a pharmacist who claimed she was fired because of her gender and in retaliation for complaining about safety conditions, Reuters reports.

Maureen McPadden claimed that Wal-Mart used her loss of a pharmacy key as a pretext for firing her in November 2012, when she was 47, after more than 13 years at the retailer.

“McPadden said she was fired in retaliation for her raising concerns that customers at the Wal-Mart store in Seabrook, New Hampshire, where she worked were getting prescriptions filled improperly because of inadequate staff training,” Reuters reports.

Read the article.

Exterro has made available for download the results of a 2016 survey of federal judges and e-discovery lawyers on how judges and attorneys respond to the same e-discovery questions.

“Based on the complexity of today’s “Digital Age,” being undereducated and underprepared is no longer an option,” Exterro says on its website. “However, an expectation gap still exists between what judges expect related to the process of e-discovery and what attorneys think is appropriate. The results from this year’s Federal Judges Survey will give legal professionals an inside look on how judges and attorneys respond to the same e-discovery questions, along with information to improve their pre-trial litigation practices in 2016.”

Survey results cover such topics as the effectiveness of new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), general e-discovery competency in the legal market, and the effects of emerging technology trends on litigation practices.

Download the survey results.

In a scathing ruling issued Friday, a state judge in Lubbock declared that prominent Dallas trial lawyer Bill Brewer committed misconduct when he used so-called push polling to improperly influence potential jurors in a West Texas wrongful death and products liability case, reports The Dallas Morning News.

“State District Judge Ruben Reyes described Brewer’s conduct as ‘unprofessional’ and ‘unethical’ — findings that Brewer adamantly denies — and ordered the hard-charging trial lawyer to pay more than $133,000 in sanctions and take 10 hours of legal ethics courses,” according to the report.

Brewer and his law firm conducted a push poll with questions and statements “designed to influence or alter the opinion or attitude of the person being polled,” the judge ruled.

Read the article.

A class-action suit has been filed in federal court in Portland against two daily fantasy sports sites, FanDuel and DraftKings, alleging both businesses are operating illegal online sports betting, reports The Oregonian.

“Brandon Peck, a resident of Polk County, brought the suit on behalf of himself and more than 100 other Oregon players who lost money in the past three years while placing wagers online through the two sites, Draftkings.com and FanDuel.com,” according to the report.

The plaintiff is asking the court to halt the companies’ operations and have each business pay players back double the amount they’ve “wrongfully lost,” seeking more than $5 million.

Read the article.

Trial lawyer Robin L. Harrison, who has a 30-year track record of representing both plaintiffs and defendants in business disputes, has joined the Houston-based commercial litigation firm Hicks Thomas LLP as a partner.

A longtime Houston lawyer, Harrison focuses his practice on the trial and resolution of business disputes, including cases involving claims of fraud and misrepresentation, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duties, trade secret misappropriation and professional negligence. He previously was a name partner at Campbell Harrison & Dagley LLP.

On the plaintiff side, Harrison has won multimillion-dollar jury verdicts and settlements against major corporations and national accounting firms. He achieved prominence representing the class of thousands of former Enron employees who lost their retirement savings when the company collapsed. His defense work includes take-nothing verdicts for a Fortune 500 data processing company in trade secrets and employment cases and a significant defense judgment for an interstate pipeline company in a natural gas contract dispute.

Read more details.

Relying on “basic principles of contract law,” the Supreme Court has held that an unaccepted settlement offer and offer of judgment under Rule 68 are “legal nullit[ies]” that have no effect on whether a live controversy remains between the parties, according to an analysis written by BakerHostetler’s Jacqueline Matthews and Rand McClellan and published on JDSupra.com.

The case is Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, No. 14-857.

“The upshot of the Court’s decision is that a defendant cannot moot a putative class action by merely offering full relief to the named plaintiff on his or her individual claims,” the authors write. “The Court, however, expressly left open the question of whether payment of full individual relief could moot the case.”

Read the article.

A trial that was supposed to help settle hundreds of lawsuits stemming from General Motors’ faulty ignition switches abruptly ended Friday, a day after the judge raised questions about the plaintiff’s truthfulness, reports the Associated Press.

The case involved a claim by Robert Scheuer of Oklahoma, who complained that a faulty ignition switch prevented his air bags from inflating during a 2014 car crash.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman agreed that evidence submitted by GM revealed that a document supporting Scheuer’s claims appeared to have been doctored and it seems he was more physically functional after his accident than he claimed. By the next morning, General Motors Co. and Scheuer’s lawyers said they wanted to call the trial off, the AP reports.

Read the article.

Houston-based Ahmad, Zavitsanos, Anaipakos, Alavi & Mensing has added nine attorneys.

The nine hires include Masood Anjom, associate; Jack Burleigh, of counsel; Cameron Byrd, associate; Nathan Campbell, associate; Scott W. Clark, of counsel; Hilary S. Greene, associate; Foster C. Johnson, associate; and Doug Salisbury, associate.

AZA is a trial firm working with high-stakes litigation for multinational companies, also representing individuals and mid-sized businesses with serious legal issues. The firm also manages company investigations, helping company boards, in-house counsel, and audit committees identify problems and ensure compliance before litigation ensues.

Read more about the new hires.

A couple of words here or there in a contract can make a huge difference, particularly when those words relate to what happens if there is a breach or some other dispute between the parties, writes Shep Davidson in Burns & Levinson’s blog, The In-House Advisor.

He discusses the case of Family Endowment Partners, L.P. v. Sutow.

That case involved a lawsuit that resulted in a $48 million award to the plaintiffs in a ruling issued by an arbitrator. Part of the award included triple damages. Davidson explains how some simple changes in the contract could have avoided much of the defendant’s loss.

Read the article.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a rare setback Wednesday to companies trying to avoid potentially expensive class-action lawsuits when justices ruled that offers of full compensation to the lead plaintiff in such a case do not automatically end the legal challenge, reports USA Today. The 6-3 decision was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“An unaccepted settlement offer, like other unaccepted contract offers, creates no lasting right or obligation,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the 6-3 opinion. “Once unaccepted, the offer is off the table.”

“The case was among several on the court’s docket this term that could lead to more or fewer class-action lawsuits,” the report says.

Read the article.

A fired contingent fee attorney can’t enforce a provision in his fee agreement requiring a client to pay the lawyer 20 percent of his eventual recovery if the client changes counsel, a divided Pennsylvania Superior Court declared Jan. 5, reports Bloomberg BNA.

“Enforcing the termination provision would penalize the client for exercising his absolute right to end the attorney-client relationship, Judge Kate Ford Elliott said in the majority opinion. In this situation, Elliott said, lawyers are limited to recapturing the reasonable value of their services, but that award can reflect the extent of the lawyer’s contribution to obtaining the client’s recovery,” the report explains.

“Just as a lawyer may not charge an exorbitant fee or place a ‘no termination’ clause in the contract or assert a vested interest in a client’s claim, a lawyer may not penalize a client for discharging him or her,” Elliott wrote.

Read the article.

U.S. drugmaker Merck & Co. on Friday said it would pay $830 million to settle a federal class action lawsuit involving allegations the company failed to adequately inform investors about heart risks from its now-recalled Vioxx pain medication, according to a report on the Business Insurance website.

“The drug was approved by U.S. regulators in 1999 as a new type of treatment for pain and quickly became a blockbuster product, ultimately used by an estimated 20 million Americans,” according to a Reuters report. “But the company in 2004 recalled Vioxx from the market after a colon-polyp prevention study showed it more than doubled the risk of heart attacks or stroke after 18 months of use.”

The company’s cash payment for the settlement and fees will be about $680 million after reimbursement from insurance policies, Merck said.

Read the article.

The recent problems experienced by Finish Line should be instructive to all users and providers of technology products and services, according to a report posted by FisherBroyles LLP.

The Indianapolis specialty retailer acknowledged a problem with deployment of a new warehouse and order management software system. Stores sales dropped 5.8 percent due to the disrupted supply chain issues that failed to maintain adequate inventory to meet demand in its stores. And the company replaced its CEO.

Such situations often result in major litigation between customer and vendor, and often claims by shareholders of the customer, the report says.

It lists concerns that should be addressed by customers and vendors when drafting such agreements.

Read the report.

The typical reinsurance contract arbitration involves a tri-partite panel of arbitrators, with each party appointing an arbitrator and a separate process governing appointment of the third arbitrator (known as “the umpire”),” according to a white paper published by Sidley Austin LLP and available on Lexology.com.

Most arbitrations run smoothly, the paper says, but “arbitrators should be ready for the exceptional case, which can be occasioned by another arbitrator or counsel. The remedy for rogue behavior may rest within the panel, or it may require judicial intervention. Judicial relief can be hard to come by, given the procedural and substantive hurdles to be cleared; but the truly egregious case has a way of catching a court’s attention.”

The article examines some examples of panel breakdown and how they have been addressed.

Read the white paper.

The law you choose to govern your contract may not be the law that governs the applicable statute of limitations for claims arising under or related to that contract, writes Glenn West in Weil, Gotshal & Manges’ blog, Global Private Equity Watch.

“Standard choice of law clauses do not in fact choose all of the law of the chosen state; many unknowingly only choose some of that law and that part of the chosen law may only apply to claims in contract but not in tort,” he writes.

The bottom line, West says, is that “unless your choice of law clause specifically states that the statutes of limitations applicable to claims arising under or related to the contract are also governed by the contractually chosen law, the statutes of limitations applicable to the claims governed by the chosen law will be the applicable statutes of limitations of the forum state where the claim is made.”

Read the article.

Lex Machina has published an article highlighting IP trends and data from 2015, including the fact that the distribution of patent cases among district courts remains highly uneven, with the Eastern District of Texas receiving 2,540 cases comprising 43.6 percent of all cases filed in 2015.

Patent litigation in U.S. district courts grew in 2015, with 5,830 patent cases filed, a 15.0 percent rise from 2014 (5,070 cases). Except for 2013, which remains the high-water year for patent litigation (6,114 cases), 2015 surpassed all other previous years.

The report, written by Brian Howard, covers statistics showing filing by quarters for the most-active districts.

Another section of the report covers activity at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), charting petitions by quarter.

The section on trademark litigation reports that fewer trademark cases were filed in 2015 than in any of the previous 10 years, although 2015’s total of 3,449 cases is only 11.6% lower than the median over the same time frame.

Lex Machina’s Copyright Report explains the difference between file sharing cases (those having John Doe or anonymous defendants and accusations based on file sharing technology such as BitTorrent), and other, more traditional cases, detailing the trends.

Read the report.