Frank R. Jimenez

Raytheon Companyhas announced the appointment of Frank R. Jimenez as general counsel for the company, effective Jan. 19.

Jimenez, 50, previously served as general counsel of the Navy from 2006-2009, and was one of seven Senate-confirmed Pentagon civilians of four-star equivalent rank overseeing the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. He succeeds Jay B. Stephens, who is retiring from Raytheon on March 31 after serving 12 years as Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary.

Prior to joining Raytheon, Jimenez served as general counsel, secretary and managing director, corporate affairs of Bunge Limited, a Fortune Global 200 agribusiness and food company with 35,000 employees and $60 billion in 2013 revenues.

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Thomas Sabatino

Walgreens Boots Alliance top attorney Thomas Sabatino is the latest executive to leave the company, according to a report in The Chicago Tribune.

Sabatino will join Hertz Global Holdings as senior executive vice president, chief administrative officer and general counsel starting Feb. 9.

“Sabatino had been general counsel for the former Walgreen Co. since 2011 and chief administrative officer since last year,” The Tribune reports. “He will remain with the company until the end of January, a month after Walgreen’s acquisition of Alliance Boots closed Dec. 31 and formed holding company Walgreens Boots Alliance.”

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Apple Inc. and Ericsson AB are suing each other in U.S. courts after failing to reach an agreement over the pricing of wireless-technology patents used by the maker of the iPhone and iPad, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Apple, saying that Ericsson is seeking excessive royalty rates, asked a federal court in California Jan. 12 to rule that Ericsson’s patents aren’t essential to long term evolution, or LTE, standards. Stockholm-based Ericsson said it filed a complaint in a district court in Texas, asking for a verdict on whether its fees are fair, Blomberg reports.

Ericsson helped pioneer the mobile-device market with its handsets in the 1990s but sold its mobile-phone business to Sony Corp. in February 2012, five years after Apple introduced the iPhone, which is now its largest revenue source.

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MetLife Inc., the U.S. life insurer deemed by regulators as too big to fail, engages in in practices that threaten national economic health, according to a lawsuit filed by a policyholder, reports Bloomberg News.

MetLife, the biggest U.S. life insurer by assets, made misleading statements about its financial condition and overstated the amount of reserves it maintains to absorb unexpected losses or financial shocks, according to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court by policyholder Andrew Yale.

MetLife “is engaging in conduct that imperils the financial future of Metropolitan Life’s policyholders, their beneficiaries, and the public at large,” Yale said in his complaint.

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A pair of Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate have re-introduced legislation aimed at preventing the abuse of offshore tax havens by multinational companies, reports Accounting Today.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, a senior member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Senate Budget Committee, introduced the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act on Monday. The bill would close a number of offshore tax breaks, eliminating many tax incentives for U.S. companies to move jobs and operations offshore, and modifying the rules on corporate inversions for businesses dodging U.S. taxes.

Doggett and Whitehouse introduced similar legislation in 2013, Accounting Today reports.

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While there may be an array of cloud technologies available to businesses, not all companies are embracing those services, new research shows.

Business News Daily reports that just 33 percent of companies are moving “full steam ahead” with their cloud services plans, according to a study from the Cloud Security Alliance. More than 40 percent of businesses are adopting cloud technology, but with caution; 15 percent are still in the early stages of investigating what’s out there; and 11 percent aren’t placing much of a priority on them, the survey found.

Security of data is the top concern, with 73 percent of businesses saying it’s their biggest cloud challenge.

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Can the Federal Bureau of Investigation wire up your longtime company counsel and then use recordings of the conversations against you in court? The answer – as reported in The Wall Street Journal‘s Risk & Compliance Journal – is often yes, according to legal experts and a ruling by a New Jersey federal judge.

Joseph Sigelman, the ousted chief executive of oil services firm PetroTiger, was seeking to have a secretly recorded conversation with his former general counsel turned informant, barred from his coming trial for foreign bribery. Sigelman, who maintains his innocence, argued that the secret video recording made with a camera attached to the lawyer Gregory Weisman, who also sometimes served as his personal attorney, violated his right to attorney-client confidentiality, The Journal reports.

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Sometimes negotiators care so much about the issues at stake that they mistake compromise for surrender, says the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Sometimes they’re so confident things will go their way they don’t try hard enough.

The program’s list of the 10 Worst Negotiations of 2014 includes talks that failed for one or both of these reasons, as well as for numerous other lapses. “As we reflect on the shortcomings of 2014, let’s learn from the past and strive to negotiate more rationally in 2015.” the program says on its website.

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Over the past five years, law firms in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston have put online – for free – the documents that startups need to execute basic legal transactions.

Tech Crunch reports that new sites Cooley GO and WHLaunch join first-movers Founders’ Workbench and Start-Up Forms Library, to enable entrepreneurs to incorporate their company, secure early-stage financing, hire employees and compensate them with stock options. SeriesSeed.com has emerged as an industry standard for documenting seed investments, and StartupCompanyLawer.com offers answers to over 100 frequently asked questions, along with a term-sheet generator.

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When Elon Musk, who loudly disdains the traditional auto industry, makes his first public appearance in Detroit in two years on Tuesday, it will be easy to see how much has changed since then, The Wall Street Journal says in a new post.

In a speech Tuesday at an auto-show event, Musk is expected to criticize larger auto makers for not responding to Tesla even more aggressively. He denounces the rest of the industry as only halfheartedly trying to produce battery-powered cars for the masses, not just early adopters.

The Journal says Tesla is worth $26 billion in stock-market value, nearly half the size of GM or Ford Motor Co.

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Battle lines are being drawn over last year’s Delaware court ruling that lets companies shift legal fees to investors bringing lawsuits, reports Pensions & Investments.

At the center of the fight is the Delaware Supreme Court decision in ATP Tour Inc. et al. vs. Deutscher Tennis Bund, upholding the corporation’s right to unilaterally amend its bylaws to make unsuccessful shareholder litigants personally liable for legal expenses, even if they prevailed on some, but not all, of the issues.

Pensions & Investments says that, although ATP Tour is a private company, at least 50 public companies added similar bylaws to their governing documents after the ruling, according to a list compiled by law firm Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check LLP, which represents institutional investors in securities litigation.

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United Airlines has announced that Brett Hart, its executive vice president and general counsel, will assume responsibility for customer care and customer experience. John Rainey, United’s chief financial officer, will take on strategy.

Hart joined the airline in 2010 after a stint in the same job for food group Sara Lee, following a period as a partner for the Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, reports Quartz.com.

Hart will have his job cut out for him, Quartz says. Despite making improvements in metrics like on-time performance, mishandled bags, passenger complaints, and overbooked flights, United still ranked 12th out of 15 U.S. airlines, and last among major carriers, according to the annual Air Quality Rankings released in April.

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Chief information officers are under more pressure than ever to accurately assess their organization’s ability to respond to both internal and external threats, reports CIO Insight. The board of directors and its audit committee are asking questions about information security readiness, and the CEO, CFO and general counsel are looking to the CIO for real-time answers.

Currently, there are two trends that are moving in opposing directions, putting CIOs between a rock and hard place.

The first trend, according to CIO Insight: Social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) provide opportunities for criminals to, at a minimum, damage a company’s brand.

And the second trend: Explosive demand for chief information security officers (CISO) has created a dramatic shortage of information security, risk and cyber-talent at all levels.

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National law firm Wilson Elser announced the opening of its 27th U.S. office located in Edwardsville, Illinois, Madison County, expanding the firm’s national footprint and its presence in the Midwest.

Edwardsville is the seventh office the firm has opened in the past four years. It serves Southern Illinois, St. Louis and clients throughout the Midwest region.

Brian Huelsmann, formerly with HeplerBroom LLC, joined the Am Law 200 firm to open the new office and serve as its regional managing partner.

“Brian’s trial and litigation skills, and his success managing large dockets provide Wilson Elser’s clients with an invaluable counselor,” said Daniel J. McMahon, Wilson Elser chairman. “He brings a wealth of experience, having served as counsel for a wide variety of insurance carriers and insureds in the Midwest and elsewhere, and adheres to Wilson Elser’s tenets of excellent lawyering and a focus on client service.”

“With 27 U.S. offices and four in the Midwest in Chicago, Michigan, Milwaukee and now Edwardsville, Wilson Elser is strategically positioned to serve clients in more jurisdictions throughout the country,” added Mr. McMahon.

Mr. Huelsmann’s practice encompasses toxic tort, personal injury, product liability and commercial litigation matters. He represents Fortune 500 companies, insurers, insureds and self-insureds.

Named for inclusion in Super Lawyers, Mr. Huelsmann is admitted to practice in Illinois, Missouri and Pennsylvania. He has presented and published on asbestos and personal injury–related topics and is an active member of DRI: The Voice of the Defense Bar, serving on its annual toxic tort conference planning committee.

Mr. Huelsmann earned his J.D. degree from Southern University School of Law (2001) and his B.A. degree from Rockhurst University (1997).

About Wilson Elser
Wilson Elser, a full-service and leading defense litigation law firm (www.wilsonelser.com), serves its clients with nearly 800 attorneys in 27 offices in the United States and one in London and through a network of affiliates in key regions globally. Founded in 1978, it ranks among the top 200 law firms identified by The American Lawyer and is included in the top 50 of The National Law Journal’s survey of the nation’s largest law firms. Wilson Elser serves a growing, loyal base of clients with innovative thinking and an in-depth understanding of their respective businesses.

Microsoft former chief privacy adviser Caspar Bowden recently presented “The Cloud Conspiracy 2008 – 2014,” in which he considered how likely is it, legally or technically, that data centers have secret doors for warrantless mass surveillance by government entities.

Network World said in a Jan. 7 report that Bowden explained how the 2008 changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendment Act (FISAAA) added the secret surveillance of remote computing services, aka the cloud. That surveillance, he said, doesn’t have to be triggered by potential criminality or national security, but is instead “purely political surveillance” of  “ordinary lawful democratic activities.”

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Ex-employees are leaving behind orphan 401(k) accounts with abandon, and employers are dumping the funds into forced Individual Retirement Accounts with conservative default investments and high fees, where they whittle down to nothing, according to a new Government Accountability Office Report, 401(K) Plans: Greater Protections Needed for Forced Transfers and Inactive Accounts.

Forbes reports that , at one IRA provider the GAO studied, an unclaimed $1,000 account would be reduced to zero in just 9 years (to blame: a $50 one-time account set-up fee, a $50 annual fee, and a $65 annual address search fee, combined with an 0.11 percent investment return).

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Morgan Stanley has confirmed discovery of an insider who allegedly stole account data relating to up to 10 percent of the firm’s Wealth Management accounts, reports ZDnet.

The new year may have only just begun, but financial institution Morgan Stanley already has a disaster to cope with. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, last summer, Morgan Stanley financial adviser Galen Marsh was able to sift through the account records of approximately 350,000 clients — while almost none of them were his particular clients.

By the end of the year, some of these records appeared online, with offers to trade this sensitive information for digital currency. A Dec. 15 posting touted roughly six million account records from the company, while a second notice posted on Dec. 27 provided specific details on 1,200 accounts, asking for 78,000 speedcoins in return, according to the publication.

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American Apparel Inc. has strengthened rules to prevent sexual harassment among its employees, just one month after firing controversial founder Dov Charney as chief executive officer for alleged misconduct, Bloomberg reports.

Managers and subordinates are now prohibited from having romantic relationships, including dating casually, according to the new ethics code on the Los Angeles-based company’s website. At about 6,200 words, the new code is more than four times as long as its predecessor.

Bloomberg reports that American Apparel is working to get a fresh start after officially firing Charney on Dec. 16, ending a six-month saga that began when the board suspended him in June for misconduct. In removing Charney, the directors said he violated the chain’s sexual-harassment policies and improperly bought travel for family members with company funds. While Charney declined to comment to Bloomberg, his lawyer has called the allegations “baseless.”

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The National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel’s Office has again signaled its commitment to expanding the scope of the current test for joint employment, reports Orrick’s Employment Law and Litigation Blog.

In a move that could have implications for a broad array of franchise relationships, on Dec. 19, 2014, the General Counsel of the NLRB announced that it has issued complaints against both McDonald’s franchisees and McDonald’s USA, the franchisor, as a joint employer.

The decision to name McDonald’s as a respondent is consistent with the General Counsel’s recent advocacy that the current joint employment standard is too narrow, the blog reports.

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