Bloomberg Law reports that Generic drug distributor P&L Development LLC’s general counsel and an outside firm may continue to represent P&L in its breach-of-contract and fraud suit against Bionpharma Inc., a federal court in North Carolina ruled.

Bionpharma wanted to disqualify Charles Cain, P&L’s general counsel. P&L is suing Bion for breach of supply agreements that Cain approved when he was general counsel at a defunct predecessor of Bion’s, explains Bloomberg’s Martina Barash.

But any confidential information about the predecessor’s capabilities that Cain acquired during the agreements’ drafting wouldn’t help P&L in this suit, the court said.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

A post on the Carlton Fields website updates the latest ruling in a class action alleging violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act and breach of contract.

A U.S. district court had compelled arbitration pursuant to an agreement between the plaintiff and defendant, but it struck as unlawful a waiver clause that appeared to forbid class or collective arbitration of her claims, reasoning that the plaintiff could not waive her right to bring a class action under the National Labor Relations Act.

On appeal, the Seventh Circuit was faced with reconciling the district court’s decision with a subsequently-decided U.S. Supreme Court case, writes Gail E. Jankowski.

Read the article.

Seattle and its insurers have agreed to pay $65.75 million to the family of Brooke Taylor, an amount representing the largest individual personal injury settlement in the city’s history, likely the largest in Washington state and among the largest ever in the country, reports Crosscut.

“The enormous sum is the result of a confluence of circumstances,” explains Crosscut’s David Kroman. “Taylor was 38 at the time of the crash and in the early part of what was an already decorated career with the law firm Susman Godfrey as an intellectual property litigation attorney. When she was still working, she was being showered with praise, and several industry publications had counted her among the country’s best lawyers.”

Taylor has a full-time medical attendant and currently lives in an assisted-care facility near her family’s home.

Read the Crosscut article.

Courthouse News Service reports that an attorney in Houston filed a lawsuit claiming he was conducting a deposition with a client when he encountered Apple’s latest bug that allowed others to access his iPhone’s microphone without him answering a FaceTime call.

The New York Times explains how the bug worked:

“By adding a second person to a group FaceTime call, you can capture the audio and video of the first person called before that person answers the phone, or even if the person never answers.”

The Houston lawyer, Larry D. Williams II, seeks punitive damages against Apple and unknown parties for claims of product liability, negligence, warranty and fraudulent misrepresentation.

CNBC reports that Williams claimed the experience caused “sustained permanent and continuous injuries, pain and suffering and emotional trauma that will continue into the future” and that Williams “lost ability to earn a living and will continued to be so in the future.”

Read the Courthouse News Service article.

Above the Law reports that the Biglaw firm of Reed Smith has been named in a $500 million malpractice lawsuit filed by two defunct Bear Stearns investment feeder funds that Reed Smith represented in RMBS-related litigation.

Plaintiffs claim that Reed Smith failed to bring a case against the rating agencies — Standard & Poors, Moody’s, and Fitch Ratings — in a timely manner, resulting in those claims being dismissed, explains Above the Law senior editor Kathryn Rubino.

From the complaint:

“Reed Smith’s negligent failure to understand New York’s statute of limitations cost the Bear Stearns Funds what Reed Smith identified as a billion-dollar claim against various rating agencies.”

Read the Above the Law article.

Dale Kleber was 58 years old when he applied for a senior staff attorney position with CareFusion Corporation. On paper, his 25 years of legal experience, including serving as general counsel for a large corporation, showed he was qualified for the job.

But the position sought someone with three to seven years of legal experience. Kleber didn’t receive an invitation for an interview, but a 29-year-old lawyer was hired instead. Kleber sued under the ADEA, arguing that the seven-year experience cap on the position discriminates against older workers by automatically disqualifying them for the job.

Courthouse News Service reports that Kleber’s age discrimination suit failed when the en banc Seventh Circuit ruled Wednesday that the protections of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act apply only to current employees, not to job applicants.

Read the Courthouse News article.

Volkswagen AG is paying out $175 million to plaintiffs’ attorneys in the $10 billion settlement over the “clean diesel” litigation. But many who say they worked on those cases won’t be getting any money, according to Bloomberg Law.

“Only attorneys chosen as class counsel in the consolidated litigation, and attorneys working on assignments from class counsel, are entitled to attorneys’ fees, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said Jan. 22,” reports Bloomberg’s Martina Barash.

“That means numerous attorneys who worked on suits before the appointment of class counsel won’t get paid,” she adds. “That includes for work they did filing complaints, attempting to negotiate early settlements, and fielding calls with clients and other attorneys.”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a San Francisco attorney’s request Tuesday to order Yelp to take down an online denunciation by a former client, leaving intact a California Supreme Court ruling that said the online review company can’t be ordered to remove libelous or offensive content, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

At the trial level, a judge had found the client’s attack on San Francisco attorney Dawn Hassell to be libelous and ordered Yelp to remove it. Later the state’s high court found that the removal order conflicted with a federal law that shields internet service providers from legal responsibility for statements posted by others, writes the Chronicle‘s Bob Egelko.

The suit resulted from a one-star review on Yelp that described the plaintiff’s firm as incompetent and advising others to avoid it.

Read the SF Chronicle article.

Business Insider reports that about 2,000 of HP’s and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s salespeople will finally be getting their share of a $25 million settlement paid to them by the two companies.

“In 2017, HP agreed to the $25 million settlement, from which the lawyers will take their cut — but it was just this week that the court approved the settlement arrangement, according to Business Insider’s Julie Bort. “That means the money should be soon forthcoming to the plaintiffs at last, according to the final court documents seen by Business Insider.”

The company’s salespeople complained that the company’s antiquated computer systems were not doing a good job of calculating their commissions.

Read the Business Insider article.

The National Safety Council’s recently released report on preventable injury and fatality statistics, reveals that accidental opioid overdoses have overtaken car accidents as a leading cause of deaths among Americans, according to a post on the website of Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

“For the first time since the early 1960s, the life expectancy of Americans is consistently decreasing. Irrespective of all the advances in medicine that have occurred since the early 1960s, Americans are actually living shorter lives than they did only 10 years ago. The primary reason for this decline is the opioid epidemic, which was created in substantial part by the irresponsible marketing and distribution of these drugs by major drug companies,” notes Dallas attorney Jeffrey Simon of Simon Greenstone Panatier, P.C.

Simon Greenstone and co-counsel collectively represent more than 50 counties in Texas as well as other states in opioid litigation, seeking to recover economic damages caused by the reckless and negligent spread of highly addictive opioid drugs in communities across the U.S.

“The fact that the risk of death from accidental overdose of opioid drugs now exceeds the death risk from motor vehicle crashes, fire, drowning or even gun assault is another grim testament to the fact that corporate misconduct can, and has, destroyed many innocent lives. On behalf of our clients, we will hold those companies accountable for the harm they’ve done.”

Even an informal email can constitute acceptance of a contractual offer, warns The In-House Advisor.

“Moreover, just a few months ago, Judge Timothy Hillman took this principle one step further by ruling, in Witt v. American Airlines, that an exchange of emails can form a binding settlement agreement, even if the parties have not agreed to all of the terms of that settlement,” explains author Shepard Davidson, a Burns Levinson partner.

The judge found that both sides had agreed to a settlement in an email exchange. When the plaintiff later tried to reopen discussions, American Airlines filed a motion to enforce settlement agreement. The court allowed the motion.

Read the article.

Many of the recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on arbitration agreements cases have been decided by narrow 5-4 majorities, which has raised the possibility that the replacement of Justice Anthony Kennedy by Brett Kavanaugh might lead to some softening of the court’s position in those cases.

But as Ronald Mann, writing in the SCOTUSblog points out, the latest such ruling will shed no light on that broader question, because even the justices more skeptical about arbitration saw no merit in the arguments against arbitration here.

Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the unanimous court. In this case anyway, none of the justices saw any merit in a process calling for collateral litigation over the gateway question of arbitrability.

“At bottom, the question is whether a court or an arbitrator decides whether an arbitration agreement governs a particular dispute,” writes Mann.

Read the article.

A U.S. judge overseeing a veteran’s multimillion-dollar negligence lawsuit in Puerto Rico rebuked the Justice Department for attempting to use the partial government shutdown to put the case on hold, calling the request “laughable,” according to a Bloomberg Law report.

Bloomberg’s Erik Larson writes: “In a ruling denying the government’s bid for more time, U.S. District Judge William G. Young said lapses in federal appropriations, like the current one triggered by President Donald Trump’s demand for funding for a border wall with Mexico, aren’t a government ‘policy’ that could theoretically justify staying such a lawsuit.”

The judge decried “an abdication by the president and the Congress” of the duty to govern responsibly.

Read the Bloomberg Law report.

While a $4.7 billion jury verdict in a talc case against Johnson & Johnson in July was eye-popping — the sixth-largest ever in a product-defect case — J&J may pay far less, or nothing, reports Bloomberg. No verdict of that size has survived appeal.

“Indeed, of the 25 largest U.S. jury awards, 23 were reversed, drastically cut or against defendants with few or no assets who couldn’t pay, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The remaining two, including the one against J&J, are being appealed. Most such revisions are by judges overruling angry jurors or enforcing court-imposed limits on punitive damages,” writes Bloomberg’s Margaret Cronin Fisk.

But even if the award is cut or reversed, a large verdict can draw other cases.

Read the Bloomberg article.

Reuters reports that U.S. District Judge John Lungstrum of Kansas City has set aside individual contingency fee contracts that some plaintiffs’ lawyers had in place for clients in a multidistrict litigation.

The ruling rejected the claims of Watts Guerra, a Texas firm that had signed up tens of thousands of farmers to bring individual cases in state court, accusing the agricultural giant Syngenta of peddling genetically modified seeds that produced corn China refused to import. The case led to a $1.5 billion global settlement for the U.S. farmers, according to Reuters’ Alison Frankel.

“This court has the authority and duty to determine the amount of reasonable fees paid to attorneys from the settlement fund, and because any further contingent fee payments would necessarily come from proceeds from the settlement fund, the court can and does prohibit any such additional payments,” Lungstrum wrote in the opinion.

Read the Reuters article.

Former Pennsylvania state Rep. Tom Gannon has been suspended from practicing law in the state for two years due to multiple rules violations incurred while representing a client in a condominium association action, reports the Delaware County Daily Times.

Friday’s state Supreme Court order indicates Gannon persisted in filing a total 46 appeals in the state court system in a small civil dispute for a client, despite multiple denials, admonitions from the court, and even disqualification orders that should have removed him from the case entirely.

“Nevertheless, (Gannon) continued his pattern and practice of frivolous filings and appeals on behalf of Mr. King, despite the fact that doing so was in contravention of court orders,” according to the order.

Read the Daily Times article.

An Ohio appellate court has addressed an issue that arose when an arbitrator specified in a contract is no longer available.

Pepper Hamilton’s Constructlaw blog covers the case in which a homeowner sued a contractor, alleging unjust enrichment and fraud. The contractor moved to compel arbitration under the agreement arbitration provision. But the specified arbitrator, the Ohio Arbitration and Mediation Center, appeared to be defunct.

“Because it was still possible to arbitrate the issues, the Court determined the agreement was not unenforceable due to impossibility,” writes Ryan R. Deroo. “The Court explained that this conclusion was consistent with the intent of the parties as they agreed to arbitrate disputes, and a change in forum should not override the fundamental purpose of the arbitration provision.”

The appellate court directed the trial court to appoint another arbitrator.

Read the article.

Bloomberg Law reports that companies that turn to the federal courts to resolve fights with rivals and customers may find themselves in limbo if the government shutdown continues beyond next week.

The system can spend money left over from fees and other sources to run through Jan. 11, writes Bloomberg’s Erik Larson.

“After that, nonessential workers at the 94 federal district courts, and at higher courts across the country, may have to stay home even as skeleton crews show up—without pay—to handle matters deemed essential under U.S. law, including many criminal cases,” Larson explains.

Individual courts and judges then will decide how to fulfill those critical functions.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

The ABA Journal reports on a Chicago lawyer who has been accused of belittling his opposing counsel during a deposition and then describing the judge’s reaction to his conduct as “robe rage.”

Charles Andrew Cohn was accused in a complaint before the hearing board of the Illinois attorney disciplinary commission.

During a deposition, the complaint says, Cohn instructed his client not to answer a question, spurring the opposing lawyer to note her disagreement. “Certify the question,” said the opposing lawyer.

“OK,” Cohn replied. “Then certify your own stupidity.”

Cohn doubled-down when he filed a response to the opposing lawyer’s motion to compel. He wrote that — in a hearing on the motion — the judge had himself flown into a rage in the court hearing, describing the situation as a “robe rage incident.”

Read the ABA Journal‘s article.

A team from Davis Wright Tremaine successfully prevailed in a defamation suit against BuzzFeed brought by Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarev, the firm announced in a release.

On Dec. 19, U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro in the Southern District of Florida granted the legal team’s request for summary judgment, finding that the dossier at the heart of the case met the criteria under the fair report privilege, thereby ending the case.

“We are extremely pleased that Judge Ungaro affirmed our client’s First Amendment rights in this matter. Fighting against restraints on reporting and maintaining public confidence in the constitutionally-mandated right to a free and unfettered press is vitally important, perhaps more so now than ever,” said lead counsel Katherine Bolger.

The case is Gubarev et al. v. BuzzFeed Inc. et al. The Davis Wright Tremaine team was led by partners Katherine M. Bolger and Nathan Siegel and included associates Adam Lazier and Alison Schary.