The Houston commercial litigation firm Ahmad, Zavitsanos, Anaipakos, Alavi & Mensing P.C., or AZA, is being recognized as one of the country’s Best Law Firms for the third time by U.S. News & World Report and The Best Lawyers in America.

AZA, renowned for its courtroom success, earned a place among the top tier of Houston civil litigation firms on the national list for 2015.

The Best Law Firms recognition is one of the most prestigious national rankings in the legal profession. The list is compiled by researchers with U.S. News and Best Lawyers who survey thousands of attorneys and clients. The full listing is available at http://bestlawfirms.usnews.com/.

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An alert issued by the FBI on Monday is warning about a type of computer malware that has the ability to destroy any system it infects, reports CSO on its website. The memo, #A-000044-MW, was obtained by Salted Hash from a source that wishes to remain anonymous.

Those who have seen the memo, including the group where it was first shared, are speculating that it’s related to the incident at Sony Pictures.

In both cases – South Korea then, and Sony Pictures now – the malware forced the victim’s networks offline according to local reports out of Korea and Sony’s own employees, CSO said.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two top ex-officers of a company that operates assisted living centers with listing fake occupants at several senior residences to meet the terms of a lease and misrepresenting in regulatory filings that the company was in compliance with the lease.

A report from the SEC says the alleged fraud orchestrated by Assisted Living Concepts Inc.’s former CEO, Laurie Bebo, and former CFO John Buono between 2009 and early 2012 even extended to directing ALC staff to falsely identify Bebo’s parents and husband as residents of facilities that the company rented from Ventas Inc. Another of the purported senior residents was just seven years old, the SEC said in a news release on Wednesday.

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Berkman Solutions has posted a contracts-and-compliance white paper and slides examining the two primary sources of compliance obligations related to contracts: performance obligations and government regulations.

For each source of compliance challenge, this paper identifies methods to improve compliance and contract management.

Berkman Solutions says that compliance requirements touch every organization across industries. Regulations can lay down the rules of the road or impose barriers to business. Compliance is essential for success, like good brakes on a car. In any organization, contract management must be an integral part of compliance.

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Noted Dallas business litigator Melanie Okon has been named one of the top North Texas energy attorneys in the Dallas Business Journal’s 2014 listing of Who’s Who in Energy.

Ms. Okon, a name partner in Dallas-based Estes Okon Thorne & Carr PLLC, will be featured among the 17 key lawyers who represent companies in the energy industry in the Who’s Who in Energy section, which will be published in the Nov. 28 edition of the Dallas Business Journal.

“This recognition for Melanie reinforces what we’ve known for years,” says firm founding partner Dawn Estes. “Her work for energy companies in disputes involving pipeline construction, nuisance complaints, contract litigation and other matters has been consistently exceptional, and we’re proud to work with her. It is a significant accomplishment to earn a place on this list in one of the country’s top states for energy production.”

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Health care and biotech companies are increasingly seeing attacks by cyber criminals, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Those criminals are looking for the trove of valuable details the companies hold — stock information, research secrets and even patients’ personal data, industry experts said.

At the same time, the health and life-science sectors are underprepared for the assault from such sophisticated thieves. Well-planned “phishing” attacks and confidence tricks fool executives, scientists and hospital workers, who are often pressured to put productivity ahead of good online security practices, the Union-Tribune reports.

“Health care, a sector that accounts for one-sixth of the nation’s economy, makes an obvious target for fraud. The industry is increasingly exposed to hacking as records traditionally kept on paper are computerized. And the trend is likely to grow because the federal government is funding the adoption of electronic health records nationwide,” the newspaper says.

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Selectica offers a free white paper on integration of contract management as the key to transforming spend data into process efficiency, performance analysis and savings.

Contracts frequently provide information that is critical to determining who and how much business should be awarded to various suppliers. Bringing all the information together transforms spend data into sourcing intelligence that can be used to inform buy-side procurement decisions. Many centralized procurement organizations are integrating contract data into their processes and technology for strategic purchasing, Selectica says on its website.

This white paper discusses how to:

• Create greater trust and transparency with suppliers and shareholders
• Locate additional savings and cost avoidance opportunities
• Streamline moving from award decision to actual contract
• Create a solid foundation for spend and performance analysis

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Robert Half Technology has posted its 2015 “IT Hiring Forecast and Local Trend Report,” which was released Dec. 2.

The report discusses the latest trends and salary data for more than 70 positions, including:

Download the hiring guide.

Merrill DataSite has posted a complimentary white paper titled “Budget needs for contract management solutions: How to set budget expectations and understand vendor pricing models.”

Determining what a new contract management system really costs can be elusive, Merrill DataSite says on its website. “If you’ve talked with a few vendors, you may have found them maddeningly vague when it comes to cost, leaving you with more questions than concrete answers.

“There’s a reason vendors are reluctant to throw out a number that may be misleading. Companies’ contract management needs are so diverse that putting a price tag on meeting them is no quick, simple thing. Yet that ballpark number is precisely what you need, in order to advocate and build a case for a new system.”

The new white paper can help readers understand the cost drivers and the potential scale of budget required to meet a company’s needs.

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There is little guidance about how much monitoring of an employee’s or job candidate’s social media activities is advisable or legal, panelists said Oct. 15 at a discussion hosted by the Professional Services Council and the Equal Employment Advisory Council.

“We’re in the very early stages of the legal development here,” said Mike Eastman, senior counsel and vice president for public policy at the EEAC. “There’s no U.S. Supreme Court case interpreting Facebook posts and employment law.”

According to a report at Bloomberg BNA, government and industry have a responsibility to know what’s being posted to social media, said Charlie Sowell, senior vice president of Salient Federal Solutions, an information technology, training and engineering service company that employs workers with security clearances.

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In a federal lawsuit against a former client, Venable doesn’t simply accuse Overseas Lease Group Inc. of failing to pay a $300,000 bill, reports the ABA Journal.

The company fraudulently induced Venable to step in and pursue big-ticket contract litigation against the U.S. government on its behalf after failing to pay a $229,000 bill to its former counsel, contends the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, The Journal reports.

Then, by urging Venable to handle the case aggressively, OLG unnecessarily ran up the bill at its new law firm, the suit says.

“We intend to vigorously defend the allegations, including raising claims of gross overbilling, overstaffing and duplicative charging of time as reported to us by our independent expert’s review of the Venable invoices,” OLG general counsel Donna Marie Zerbo told the Blog of Legal Times.

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SanDisk Corp.. a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, has announced that it has appointed Mark Brazeal as senior vice president and chief legal officer. Brazeal is responsible for SanDisk’s intellectual property portfolio and licensing as well as all other legal areas, including commercial agreements, M&A transactions, litigation, corporate securities law and governance.

Brazeal spent the past 14 years at Broadcom where he most recently served as senior vice president and senior deputy general counsel with responsibilities including a wide variety of IP matters and litigation for the company.

Prior to Broadcom, Brazeal focused on IP licensing and litigation at law firms Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, CA, Yuasa and Hara in Tokyo, Japan, and Howrey & Simon in Washington, D.C.

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Freeport-McMoRan Inc. reportedly is nearing a $100 million-plus settlement to resolve shareholder litigation over its 2013 purchase of two oil-and-gas companies, an unusually big win for investors, who are increasingly challenging merger deals.

Recent reports indicate that Freeport is close to a deal to set aside more than $130 million, most of which will be paid out to its shareholders. The agreement, which is not yet final, would resolve allegations that the company overpaid when it bought McMoRan Exploration Co. and Plains Exploration & Production Co. for a combined $9 billion last year, reports The New York Times.

The Times says this deal is unusual because few M&A lawsuits yield any money for investors. And it’s also unusual because the case was filed as a “derivative” lawsuit, in which shareholders sue board members and others on behalf of the company itself.

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International law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is urging multinational companies to move whistleblowing up their risk agendas as a global survey of more than 2,500 middle and senior managers reveals high levels of corporate complacency.

The survey found that more than one in ten (12%) employees have blown the whistle, while almost half of employees (46%) would consider blowing the whistle. However, less than one in ten (7%) say whistleblowing is currently an important issue for their organization and less than half (44%) say their companies either don’t have a whistleblowing policy or fail to publicize it if there is one.

On its website, the firm says the survey data also shows that employees continue to fear reprisal for blowing the whistle. More than one third (37%) of all employees surveyed believe senior management at their organization would either treat them less favorably or look for ways to terminate their employment if they blew the whistle. Four in every ten (40%) employees say their organization discourages or actively discourages whistleblowing.

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Corporate law departments will have a big hand in changing the legal market over the next 10 years, law firm leaders said in Altman Weil’s sixth annual Law Firms in Transition Survey, which was released recently.

Large majorities of law firm leaders responding to the survey agree that greater price competition, practice efficiency, commoditization of legal work, competition from nontraditional service providers, and non-hourly billing are all permanent changes in the legal landscape. For the most part, these are changes that have been imposed upon them from without – from more demanding clients and more competitive newcomers who are challenging the rules of legal service delivery.

When asked about the most likely change agent in the legal market over the next ten years, 34% of law firm leaders identified corporate law departments as the force most likely to lead change; 32% chose technology innovation; and, 15% selected non-law-firm providers of legal services. Only 10%of respondents believe that law firms will take the lead in reinventing the legal market.

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The president of the American Bar Association is set to urge chief executives at all of America’s Fortune 500 companies to commit to ending human-rights abuses in their supply chains. The ABA president will send executives the message in a letter by the end of this year, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Even though a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has made it harder to hold U.S. companies liable for child labor, slavery, human trafficking and dangerous working conditions among their suppliers, the risks to corporate brands grows by the day, said Chris Johnson, the former general counsel of General Motors North America who heads the ABA business section’s supply-chain initiative.

The Star Tribune quoted Johnson: “Regulation is increasing. Litigation is increasing. It’s astounding to me that companies don’t get out ahead of this. It’s a time bomb.”

Some companies have tried. Johnson credits Starbucks, Microsoft and Coca-Cola with setting examples in assessing and addressing the risks of human-rights violations in their supply chains.

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Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz have posted a complimentary white paper detailing smart oracles, which can provide a simple, flexible way to implement “smart contracts.”

Smart oracles can be used to encode business logic, laws, and other agreed-upon rules, according to the white paper.

“Smart oracles build on the idea of oracles, or entities that provide smart contracts with information about the state of the outside world, and combine information gathering with contract code execution,” the authors write. “In such a system, rules can be written in any programming language and contracts can interact with any service that accepts cryptographically signed commands. This includes, but is not limited to, cryptocurrency networks. We introduce an implementation of smart oracles, called Codius (based on the Latin “ius” meaning “law”), which uses Google’s Native Client for code sandboxing.”

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Restaurant.com is arguing in federal court that it shouldn’t be forced to pay penalties for gift certificates it sold in the past, penalties that could go as high at $1 million.

The company has been defending itself since 2010 against the class action suit filed by two New Jersey residents who bought gift certificates from its website, reports the Chicago Daily Herald.

From the Daily Herald:

Larissa Shelton and Gregory Bohus are suing Restaurant.com on behalf of themselves and others over certificates that had expiration dates and a disclaimer in violation of New Jersey law. That is no longer in dispute after being argued before the New Jersey Supreme Court.

What a U.S. Court of Appeals will decide is whether the rulings can be applied retroactively, in which case Restaurant.com could have to pay a penalty of $100 each for certificates sold in the past — penalties that could total an estimated $1 million.

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Russian sanctions are defeating efforts to automate compliance using screening software, reports The Wall Street Journal.

According to The Journal‘s report, the complexity of U.S. sanctions against Russia is forcing firms to manually check thousands of transactions, slowing deals and raising the cost of compliance. Unlike past sanctions, like those against Iran, the U.S. actions against Russia are targeted to punish Moscow for its involvement in Ukraine without severing economic ties with the West. But the available screening software tools that companies use to stop forbidden transactions cannot handle the nuance of U.S. sanctions against Russia, compliance experts say.

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American Apparel Inc. has named Chelsea A. Grayson its new executive vice president, general counsel and secretary of the company. The appointment will be effective Dec. 15, 2014.

Grayson was in private practice as a corporate attorney for more than 15 years with Jones Day and Loeb & Loeb LLP, where she was a partner in the corporate groups of both firms, according to fibre 2 fashion. Her experience includes private placements of equity and debt securities for public and private companies, joint ventures and strategic alliances, and mergers and acquisitions for clients in a variety of industries, including retail.

Chelsea Grayson will replace Tobias S. Keller, who has been interim general counsel since June 2014.

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