“A federal judge has denied a request by American women’s soccer players to allow an immediate appeal of his decision to throw out their claim of unequal pay against the U.S. Soccer Federation,” reports Ronald Blum in StarTribune’s Loons.

“Lawyers for the women had asked him to enter a final judgment on his decision to dismiss the pay claim, which would have allowed them to take the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.”

“Klauser ruled May 1 the women could not prove discrimination over pay and granted in part the USSF’s motion for a partial summary judgment. He said the union for the women’s national team rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the men’s national team’s collective bargaining agreement and the women accepted guaranteed salaries and greater benefits along with a different bonus structure.”

“He also refused to let go to trial allegations the women were discriminated against because they played more games on artificial turf.”

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“A Morristown lawyer lied about making campaign contributions to Mount Arlington officials in 2016, a year before her firm was awarded a ‘lucrative contract’ with the borough, according to law enforcement officials,” reports Fred J. Aun in Tap into Roxbury’s Law & Justice.

“The lawyer, Elizabeth Valandingham, 47, of Morristown, now faces up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to $150,000 if convicted, said the state Attorney General’s Office on Friday.”

“Mount Arlington required that Valandingham certify her law firm ‘made no reportable political contributions in the year preceding the award of the contract.’ Valandingham made that certification and the borough subsequently ‘awarded the firm a lucrative contract, earning the firm in excess of $470,000.”

“The charges allege Valandingham actually donated $7,500 to Mount Arlington officials in 2016 and used ‘straw donors’ to do so surreptitiously.”

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“The law partner of the tax attorney believed to be a cooperating witness in a sweeping New Jersey pay-to-play corruption investigation has been charged with lying about thousands in political contributions made to secure lucrative municipal contracts,” reports Ted Sherman in NJ.com’s Politics.

“Elizabeth Valandingham, 47, was accused by the state Attorney General’s office of falsely claiming that her firm had not made any reportable contributions to candidates in two towns where the firm had been vying to provide legal services — when in fact it had.”

“Valandingham was a partner of Matthew O’Donnell, the Morristown tax attorney who reportedly served as an undercover informant in the wide-ranging state sting that led to charges in December against five people, including elected and former officials and political candidates. They were accused of taking tens of thousands in bribes disguised as campaign contributions in return for steering legal work to a law firm that multiple sources have said was O’Donnell McCord.”

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“A no bail arrest warrant has been issued for a prominent immigration attorney in Utah whose increasingly erratic behavior, according to police and prosecutors, culminated with him making terroristic threats against his wife in addition to making several bizarre statements,” reports Pat Reavy in KSL’s Utah News.

“Aaron Tarin, 40, of Herriman, was arrested three times over two weeks in late May through June. On Thursday he was charged in 3rd District Court with making a terroristic threat, a second-degree felony, and stalking, a third-degree felony.”

“According to charging documents, Tarin’s ex-wife reported to police that Tarin was engaging in ‘concerning behavior’ from May 18 to May 29, including sending her ‘multiple angry emails and videos … that talked about a ‘leprechaun chase’ and that ‘everybody needs to be ready for it.'”

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“A coalition of 34 state attorneys general announced on May 19, 2020, that it had secured a settlement with one of the nation’s largest subprime auto financing companies for alleged violations of state consumer protection laws. Under the settlement agreement, the terms of which are discussed in detail below, the auto financing company is required to provide significant monetary relief to consumers, $550 million in total, and substantially adjust its lending practices moving forward,” report Anthony E. DiResta and David L. Haller in Holland & Knight’s Insights.

“Without admitting any liability and to resolve the allegations without litigation, the auto financing company agreed to the entry of a consent judgment with each of the 34 state attorneys general participating in the multistate investigation and resulting enforcement actions. Collectively, those consent judgements require the auto financing company to provide $550 million in monetary relief to consumers, including $478 million in deficiency balance waivers, $65 million in restitution and $7 million in restitution management. The consent judgments do not stop at monetary relief. They also require considerable changes to the auto financing company’s lending practices.”

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“A new lawsuit filed in Kansas state court by propane supply company Ferrellgas Partners, an ex-client of Biglaw firm DLA Piper, alleges the firm engaged in ‘strident double-dealing’ that was only revealed when the wrong invoice was mistakenly sent to Ferrellgas,” reports Kathryn Rubino in Above the Law’s Biglaw.

“In July of 2018, the company hired DLA Piper for debt restructuring advice. According to the suit, the work on that matter naturally tapered off by November of that year, but the representation was not formally terminated. However, in November of 2019 Ferrellgas received a $14,000 invoice, signed by Thomas Califano — the same restructuring partner they’d previously worked with — for research about Ferrellgas. During that same time, the company was fielding hostile takeover threats.”

“The lawsuit says that after inquiries from Ferrellgas, DLA returned their client file and that the firm says an internal investigation revealed the client information was not used in connection with work for any other client. But the lawsuit draws the conclusion that the invoice revealed DLA was working for adverse interests.”

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“Six months after agreeing to a $575 million settlement in a closely watched antitrust case filed by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Sutter Health has yet to pay a single dollar, and no operational changes have gone into effect. The not-for-profit healthcare giant was accused of using its market dominance in Northern California to illegally drive up prices,” reports Jenny Gold in Modern Healthcare’s Providers.

“Late last week, Sutter’s lawyers filed a motion requesting that Judge Anne-Christine Massullo of the California state Superior Court in San Francisco delay approving the settlement for an additional 90 days, due to “catastrophic” losses stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Massullo originally was scheduled to rule on the agreement in February, but in April granted an earlier request from Sutter for a 60-day delay in the proceedings.”

“In court documents supporting its request, Sutter argues the pandemic has upended the financial landscape for hospitals and made numerous aspects of the agreement untenable. Last month, Sutter reported an operating loss of $404 million through April, citing declining patient revenue and expenses resulting from the pandemic. System officials said that loss took into account the more than $200 million the system received in COVID-19 relief funds from the federal government via the CARES Act.”

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“Following a jury verdict win on January 24, 2020 of $85.23 million in a damages-only re-trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California (the “Court”), the Court ruled late yesterday on all post-trial motions and entered final judgment in favor of WiLAN, maintaining the full jury verdict and denying Apple’s motions for retrial or lowering the damages award (the “Final Judgment”),” was reported in WiLAN’s news.

“The Court also awarded WiLAN an additional amount of $23.75 million in pre-judgment interest. The total award in the Final Judgment stands at $108.98 million and WiLAN is entitled to post-judgment interest from June 16, 2020 until the date this Final Judgment is satisfied. In addition, as indicated in the Court’s Final Judgment, there are additional royalties for products which Apple released during the pendency of the litigation that will have to be accounted for separately.”

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“The Fourth Court of Appeals of Texas overturned a jury verdict awarding HouseCanary, Inc. (“HouseCanary”) $740 million in damages for trade secret theft and fraud against Title Source, Inc., now known as Amrock,” reports Mena Gaballah, PharmD and Joshua M. Rychlinski in Crowell Moring’s Trade Secrets Trends.

“Amrock and HouseCanary are competitors in the real estate sector. Amrock provides title insurance, property valuations, and settlement services in real estate transactions. HouseCanary is a real estate analytics company that developed software to determine property values. HouseCanary agreed to provide this software to Amrock, and, according to HouseCanary, Amrock reversed engineered it. After the relationship between the two broke down, Amrock sued HouseCanary for breach of contract and fraud, and HouseCanary counterclaimed for breach of contract, fraud, misappropriation of trade secrets, among other claims. The jury found for HouseCanary, awarding it compensatory and punitive damages as well as attorney’s fees.”

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“A total of $26.1 million of the $143 million Merrimack Valley gas explosion class-action settlement was earmarked for payment of legal fees and administrative costs,” report Jill Harmacinski in The Eagle-Tribune.

“And yet, some victims are being asked to pay an 11% fee to get their checks, which are compensation for everything from spoiled food and property damage, to lodging costs, mental anguish and other fallout from the Sept. 13, 2018 gas disaster.”

“The first round of checks was recently issued with an average settlement payment of $8,000. Eleven percent of that payment is $880.”

“As of Friday, a spokesperson for Attorney General Maura Healey said the office had heard from eight recipients about the fee being assessed by attorney David Raimondo of the Raimondo Law Firm. Healey’s office is looking into this.”

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“The Law Offices of Jeffrey Lohman has faced some significant setbacks in litigation with Navient purporting that Lohman’s office set up TCPA lawsuits in violation of RICO. While no substantive ruling has been entered in that suit yet, the Court has at least preliminarily found that emails between Lohman and his clients are discoverable pursuant to the crime-fraud exception to the A/C privilege,” reports Eric J. Troutman in

“But Lohman’s office had a better day … in a suit in federal court in Missouri.”

“The Johnson case is quite different from the Navient matter in that it is not a RICO case and does not directly challenge Lohman’s (alleged) conduct of encouraging folks to stop payment to create possible TCPA lawsuits. Rather the suit involves the relationship between Lohman and something called Burlington Financial Group, which allegedly took $2,500.00 from the Plaintiff for debt services it (allegedly) never provided.”

“Lohman’s role in the overall transaction appears to be pretty limited.”

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“Two decades after Florida reached a landmark legal settlement with tobacco companies, an appeals court is slated to hear arguments Tuesday in a dispute about more than $100 million in payments,” reports News Service of Florida in Florida Politics.

“R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. wants the 4th District Court of Appeal to overturn a ruling that said the company is responsible for making payments to the state related to four brands of cigarettes: Salem, Winston, Kool and Maverick.”

“R.J. Reynolds was part of the 1997 settlement in which cigarette makers agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the state because of smoking-related health costs and, in exchange, received liability protections. An R.J. Reynolds parent company in 2015 sold the four cigarette brands to ITG Brands, LLC, which was not part of the settlement. As a result of the sale, R.J. Reynolds contends it is no longer responsible for making payments linked to the four brands.”

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“The bank has asked the U.S. to review demands that any settlement include a guilty plea to a felony charge, according to people briefed on the matter,” reports Matthew Goldstein in The New York Times Business.

“Lawyers for the bank have asked Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to review demands by some federal prosecutors that Goldman pay more than $2 billion in fines and plead guilty to a felony charge…”

“The bank has sought to pay a lower fine and avoid a guilty plea, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are continuing.”

“Authorities in the United States and Malaysia say more than $2.7 billion was diverted from the fund, known as 1MDB, in a scheme that involved the flamboyant financier Jho Low, the country’s former prime minister, and other powerful people. The fund was meant to finance projects for the benefit of the people of Malaysia, but some of the cash went to buy luxury apartments, yachts, paintings and even finance the movie ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.'”

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SmileDirectClub (SDC) “sued NBC in Tennessee federal court seeking more than $2.85 billion. The teledentistry company claims the network made more than 40 false and misleading statements in a February 2020 broadcast of NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt, including that SDC-affiliated doctors aren’t involved in treating patients, that the company’s platform amounts to “do it yourself” dentistry and that it flouts state and federal regulations,” reports Ashley Cullins in The Hollywood Reporter’s Labor.

“SmileDirectClub also alleges NBC was aware of the inaccuracies because the company had sent hundreds of pages of documents about its treatments, made senior officers available for questions, and offered to arrange interviews with dentists, orthodontists and patients. It also alleges that it told the network ‘dental trade associations and organizations have orchestrated a campaign to discredit SDC and, therefore, had a motivation to publish false information about SDC, including regarding the safety of treatment’ and says reporter Vicky Nguyen had a conflict of interest because her husband is an anesthesiologist at a brick-and-mortar oral surgery practice that competes with SDC.”

“SDC is suing for defamation and violation of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act.”

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“HP Inc. will get to keep all the cash, factories and patents Quanta Storage Inc. was ordered to turn over to satisfy a $439 million antitrust judgment from 2019, a federal appeals court ruled,” reported by Laurel Calkins of Bloomberg in Yahoo Finance.

“The Taiwanese disk drive maker was ordered to surrender almost all its assets before its appellate challenge had played out because it failed to post an $85 million bond to prevent early collection of the crippling award. The appellate court did agree to give it more time to comply.”

“‘Quanta risked bet-the-company litigation and lost, so the district court ordered it to hand over the company,’ a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals in New Orleans said Friday in a 21-page ruling.”

“Quanta tried repeatedly in April to delay HP’s push to collect on the judgment. It claimed that coronavirus travel and business restrictions in Taiwan and China, where most of its executives and factories are, prevented it from posting the bond while complying with Taiwanese regulations on asset transfers by publicly traded companies. HP said Quanta was using the pandemic as a ploy to dissipate assets that could be used to satisfy the judgment.”

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“Three Amazon.com Inc. employees at its Staten Island facility have sued the company for the lack of safety measures against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19),” reports Neer Varshney in Benzinga’s News.

“The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for New York’s Eastern District last Wednesday, alleges that the e-commerce giant violated several Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and New York state guidelines in its response to the pandemic at the State Island warehouse.”

“The workers have alleged that Amazon discouraged workers from performing basic hygiene like washing or sanitizing hands if it interfered with their work ‘even for a moment.'”

“The Seattle-based company also purposefully concealed information about workers testing positive for COVID-19 from their coworkers at the facility, the lawsuit claims.”

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“Apple will have to face a lawsuit claiming the tech giant fraudulently concealed decreased demand for iPhones, leading to tens of billions of dollars in shareholder losses,” reports Ryan J. Farrick in Legal Reader’s Lawsuits & Litigation.

“According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers trimmed the lawsuit’s scope substantially. But she maintained that shareholders may still sue Apple over Tim Cook’s comments about the iPhone’s robust performance during a November 1^st analyst call.”

“The lawsuit takes particular issue with Cook’s claim that the iPhone was faring well in China through the fourth quarter of 2018, even though sales were struggling due to political tensions.”

“In her ruling, Gonzalez Rogers found it ‘implausible’ that Apple’s chief executive would not know that iPhone demand was dropping in China—especially when, days after the call took place, Apple instructed its largest manufacturers to slow iPhone production.”

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A $5B lawsuit “accuses Google parent company Alphabet Inc. of quietly amassing data about what people do online and what sites they visit while in the private browser mode, ” reports Andy Meek in BGR’s Tech.

“Google promises consumers that they can ‘browse the web privately’ and stay in ‘control of what information [users] share with Google.’ To prevent information from being shared with Google, Google recommends that its consumers need only launch a browser such as Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, or Firefox in ‘private browsing mode.’ Both statements are untrue.”

“In fact, the language in the suit continues, when users take either or both of those steps, the company ‘continues to track, collect, and identify their browsing data in real-time, in contravention of federal and state laws on wiretapping and in violation of consumers’ rights to privacy.'”

“The size of the proposed class of plaintiffs this action could include numbers in the ‘millions,’ according to the suit, which also seeks at least $5,000 in damages per user for violations of California privacy laws as well as federal wiretapping statutes.”

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“Shortly before COVID-19 halted jury proceedings across the United States, a Mississippi jury sided with the Government to return a $10.8 million verdict against Stone County Hospital and several affiliates for what the jury found were false Medicare claims submitted in violation of the False Claims Act (“FCA”),” reports Siena Caruso in Dorsey & Whitney’s Penalties.

“In May 2007 a complaint was filed alleging the Defendants submitted false records to secure payment under Medicare for services not actually performed and otherwise conspired to submit false claims in violation of the FCA. The Government investigated for nearly eight years before intervening in the lawsuit in 2015.”

“The intervening complaint contained detailed allegations that the Defendants and others abused the special Medicare rules for Critical Access Hospitals from 2004 through 2015 by improperly claiming expenses for work not performed. Such false claims allegedly included the excessive and unwarranted compensation of Mr. Cain—who owned both Stone County Hospital and Corporate Management—as well as claims submitted for Mr. Cain’s personal luxury automobiles. The Government further alleged that Stone County Hospital’s Medicare cost reports misallocated expenses of Corporate Management to the hospital and contained inflated, unnecessary, and duplicative costs purportedly incurred by Corporate Management and related businesses owned by Mr. Cain. The Government alleged the Defendants submitted false records and statements to Medicare seeking reimbursement for these false and fraudulent expenses.”

“After a nine-week trial, a Mississippi jury returned a $10.8 million guilty verdict against Ted Cain, Julie Cain, Stone County Hospital, Corporate Management, and Tommy Kuluz on March 12, 2020. The jury found the sixth defendant—Starann Lamier, the Chief Operating Officer of Corporate Management—not guilty.”

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