David J. Beck of Houston, partner in Beck Redden LLP, was recently honored by the Litigation Section of the State Bar of Texas with the Luther (Luke) H. Soules III Award. Each year, the Litigation Section of the State Bar recognizes attorneys who embody excellence in the practice of law and exemplary service to the Bar through outstanding professionalism and community impact.

Attorneys who earn the Luke Soules Award must meet the following criteria:

• Demonstrated commitment to equal justice under law
• Conduct promoting the rule of law
• Outstanding examples of professionalism
• Community impact as a result of the practice of law
• One or more significant contributions as a result of legal representation

Read more about the honor.

Segal McCambridge Singer & Mahoney senior shareholder Paul Wojcicki once again led a team of nine Chicago SMSM shareholders and associates in editing the LexisNexis Practice Guide: Illinois Personal Injury Litigation, an annual publication that provides up-to-date information and practical pointers for attorneys of all experience levels, the firm announced.

Wojcicki and his colleagues also edited the 2014 edition of the Guide.

Joining Wojcicki on the project as contributing editors were Segal McCambridge shareholders Kevin Bugos and Mitch Morinec, and associates Lamis Eli, Anastasios Foukas, Matthew Kelly, Brian Nye, Christian Ryba, Joyce Williams and Jenni Young.

The Segal McCambridge team updated each of the Guide’s 14 chapters, which cover every step in the personal injury process, from initial client interviews to closing the case, as well as examine a range of substantive topics, such as liability theories and defenses, statutory actions and wrongful death and survival damages.

Read more about the Guide.

Wells Fargo has agreed to a $1.2 billion settlement to resolve a long-running mortgage dispute with the U.S. government, a move that slashes the bank’s 2015 profit by $134 million, reports The Charlotte News & Observer.

“The deal involves civil fraud claims brought in 2012 against the San Francisco-based bank, which the government had accused of ‘reckless’ underwriting practices that led to thousands of federally-insured loans defaulting,” according to the report. “The government said Wells Fargo’s false certifications that the loans met requirements for federal insurance resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance payouts.”

Read the article.

Lincare, a major provider of in-home respiratory care and other services, will pay $238,900 in civil monetary penalties for violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), federal authorities announced Wednesday, according to a report by Home Health Care News.

“This marks only the second time that the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has imposed civil monetary penalties for a HIPAA violation. The penalty was challenged but now has been upheld by an administrate law judge (ALJ),” the report says.

The breach involved a Lincare branch in Wynne, Arkansas, doing business as United Medical. Faith Shaw worked as a manager there from 2005 until 2009. Shaw had stored records of 278 patients in her car, which she left behind when she moved out of her marital home in 2008. Her husband reported finding those records to the OCR.

Read the article.

A Minnesota jury has awarded former general counsel Chet Taylor $600,000 from the Feltl & Co. securities firm for defaming him by implying in a 2014 public statement that Taylor lost his job as a result of an enforcement action by a securities regulator, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

In his 2014 lawsuit, Taylor claimed that he left Feltl & Co. in good standing in 2012.

The report says that Feltl, following the jury verdict, also agreed to pay an additional $250,000 to avoid trying a subsequent punitive damages claim.

Read the article.

Myanna Dellinger of the University of South Dakota School of Law has posted a discussion of a recent case in which a judge faulted Uber with presenting its drivers with a contract that was “likely, frankly, to engender confusion.”

Dellinger wrote about the case in the ContractsProf Blog.

The underlying case is a class action lawsuit against Uber for allegedly misclassifying its drivers as “independent contractors” instead of regular “employees.”

“Whether this is an example of deliberate strong-arming or intimidating the drivers into not joining the lawsuit or simply unusually poor contract drafting may never be known. Judge Chen did, however, order Uber to stop communicating with drivers covered by the class action suit and barred the company from imposing the new contract on those drivers,” Delinger writes.

Read the article.

Dallas-based technology law firm, Munck Wilson Mandala LLP  announces the addition of Shain Khoshbin as a partner in the firm’s Litigation Group.

Khoshbin focuses his practice on business disputes and commercial litigation, the firm said in a release. He has represented companies, partnerships, and entrepreneurs across the country on both sides of the docket. Khoshbin has worked with matters including hospitality management/franchising; intellectual property and unfair competition; and breaches of trust, fiduciary duties and complex contractual relationships.

“We are thrilled to have Shain return to the firm. He is a well-respected advocate who, over the course of his career, has built an impressive practice and has become a ‘go-to attorney’ for clients needing seasoned complex litigation counsel,” said William A. Munck, managing partner of Munck Wilson Mandala. “Shain adds substantial experience to our talented group of commercial litigators and trial attorneys. This is a very exciting time for our firm.”

“I have known Shain for over 20 years, and he excels at complex commercial litigation, “ said  Jamil Alibhai, Chairman of the firm’s Litigation Section. “He is a strong addition to Munck Wilson Mandala’s trial team.”

Khoshbin has been honored by Texas Super Lawyers for business litigation every year since 2007. He has been featured in the Super Lawyers Corporate Counsel and Business editions annually since 2008 and honored among the Super Lawyers Top 100 attorneys in Dallas/Fort Worth for 2011 and 2012. He is a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, Life Member of The Million Dollar Advocates Forum and Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum, and Lifetime Charter Member of Rue Ratings’ “Best Attorneys of America.”

The New York Supreme Court ruled that the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods applied in a contract case in which the plaintiff claimed that the defendant had delivered a nonconforming product that caused $1.7 million in damages plus interest and costs to the plaintiff.

David Zaslowsky and Grant Hanessian of Baker & McKenzie wrote about the case on Lexology.com.

The court denied the majority of the defendant’s dismissal motion, finding the CISG “automatically” applies “when a transaction involves a sale of goods between parties whose places of business are in different countries and those countries are parties to the CISG.”

The case also involved the statute of limitations and the borrowing statute.

Read the article.

Sometimes rescission of a property purchase is better than suing for damages, which could limited to the difference between the price paid and the value of the property received, advises Khanh Tran on the blog of Continuing Education of the Bar ● California.

Although rescission makes particular sense when recouping the purchase price is more important than living in the house, it’s not always available, he writes. He advises checking to see if certain common grounds for rescission in the real property sales context apply.

Those grounds include mutual consent, mistake, fraud, failure of consideration, illegality and prejudice to public interest.

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.

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.

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.