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Good morning. A top plaintiffs’ lawyer and his firm Beasley Allen are striking back at J&J’s bid to bounce them from talc litigation. Plus, the Wisconsin state bar was sued over a diversity fellowship program; the National Association of Realtors and brokerages are battling a $13 billion antitrust lawsuit over commissions; and lawyers for West Point today in court will fight a conservative legal group’s challenge to the school’s admissions policies. We’re long on legal news, and short on daylight. Happy Winter Solstice to all!
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A top plaintiffs’ lawyer and his firm are pressing back at J&J’s bid to disqualify them in mass tort litigation over the company’s talc products. Andrew Birchfield and his firm, Beasley Allen, in a new filing denied the company’s claim that he formed an unethical alliance with a former J&J lawyer, our colleague Brendan Pierson writes.
Birchfield and Beasley Allen urged U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp in New Jersey to reject Johnson & Johnson’s bid to kick them off the mass tort litigation. Birchfield and Beasley Allen said in the brief that J&J blamed them for defeating its two attempts at resolving the talc litigation in bankruptcy.
Now, as the company has said it plans to pursue a third bankruptcy, it “seeks to have this court remove them as obstacles,” the filing said. Practicing law, they wrote in the filing, “is a profession, not a locker-room brawl.”
J&J’s worldwide vice president for litigation, Erik Haas, said in a statement that plaintiffs’ counsel “does not dispute nor even attempt to proffer any purported justification for engaging in their illicit arrangement, because none exists.” J&J’s O’Melveny team is expected to respond to Birchfield’s filing by Dec. 29. The company has said its talc products are safe and do not contain asbestos.
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- The Wisconsin state bar was sued by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty over a diversity fellowship program for law students that the conservative legal advocacy group said violates the free speech rights of bar members whose dues are used to fund it. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges to diversity programs after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled colleges and universities cannot consider race in admissions.
- U.S. District Judge Manish Shah in Chicago acquitted environmental lawyer David Sargent, a former faculty member at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Environmental Sustainability, of insider trading charges after his co-conspirator was found not guilty of the same crime.
- A Brazilian lawyer who pleaded guilty to trading on inside information while he was serving as a visiting attorney at Gibson Dunn was sentenced to two months in prison. Prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to sentence Romero Cabral da Costa Neto to eight months behind bars.
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That’s the damages estimate in a real estate antitrust case in Illinois, where a class of home sellers have accused the National Association of Realtors and major residential brokerages of artificially inflating industry commissions. The plaintiffs, represented by Cohen Milstein, Hagens Berman and Susman Godfrey, sued in 2019 and are approaching the end line. The realtors association, represented by Cooley, and other defendants this week asked the court to rule for them on summary judgment and end the case. The case parallels one in Kansas City where a jury just awarded $1.8 billion in damages.
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Lawyers for a Texas high school student who sued social media company Snap after his science teacher allegedly used the platform to lure him into a sexual relationship said on Wednesday that they will likely ask the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether federal appellate courts have granted too broad a shield to internet publishers. The teen had asked the 5th Circuit to revisit its precedent on the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 5th Circuit declined that invitation on Monday — but seven dissenting judges suggested the next stop should be the high court. Alison Frankel has the story.
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“DABUS is not a person at all, let alone a natural person: it is a machine.“
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—Lord David Kitchin of the UK Supreme Court, writing for a panel in rejecting U.S. computer scientist Stephen Thaler’s bid to register patents for inventions created by his artificial intelligence system called DABUS. The court’s 25-page ruling came in a landmark case about whether AI can own patent rights. The UK’s Intellectual Property Office had refused to register the patents on the grounds that the inventor must be a human or a company, rather than a machine. Earlier this year, Thaler lost a similar bid in the United States.
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- The group that successfully challenged race-conscious collegiate student admissions policies at the U.S. Supreme Court will urge a federal judge to conclude the U.S. Military Academy at West Point’s affirmative action practices unconstitutionally discriminate against white applicants. The case is before U.S. District Judge Philip Halpern in White Plains, New York. The Naval Academy last week defeated a bid from the same group to enjoin its admissions policy.
- The Minnesota Court of Appeals will hear arguments in a case from a Thrifty White pharmacist who has cited his religious beliefs in refusing to dispense emergency contraception. The conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom represents the pharmacist. The group said a jury in a lower court found the Minnesota man did not discriminate based on sex. In an amicus brief backing the plaintiff, the National Women’s Law Center argued “pharmacies may not obstruct customers’ access to sex-specific prescriptions like emergency contraception.”
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Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
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- Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff and Kai Bird are part of a group of 11 nonfiction authors who joined a lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of misusing their books to train the models behind OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence-based software. The writers said in an amended complaint that the companies infringed their copyrights.
- Former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, who claimed he was tortured by Iran, accused the United States in a lawsuit of unlawfully revoking his eligibility for $20 million in federal government compensation for victims of foreign terrorism. Lawyers from Gilbert represent Hekmati, who claimed the DOJ and others violated his U.S. constitutional rights and other protections after he endured nearly five years of detention in Iran.
- The DOJ and CFPB sued a Texas real estate developer they accused of targeting thousands of Hispanic borrowers in a fraudulent land sale scheme. The case against Colony Ridge marks the first-ever predatory lending case the DOJ brought under the Fair Housing Act and Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and the CFPB’s first federal lawsuit under the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act. Colony Ridge did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
- Pornhub parent MindGeek lost its bid to block a group of child sex abuse survivors from proceeding as a class action. The plaintiffs accuse the adult website of profiting from the spread of child sexual abuse material. U.S. District Judge L. Scott Coogler in Alabama certified a class of people who were under 18 when they appeared in a video or photo of a sex act on a website operated by MindGeek or its affiliated entities.
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- Barnes & Thornburg hired labor and employment partner Leslie Eason in Atlanta. She most recently was at Gordon Rees. (Barnes & Thornburg)
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Clients regularly seek advice about and input on hiring a professional to market and sell their business. In the private equity industry, investment bankers are generally chosen by the sponsor team, write Eddy Moore, Asia Wright and John Ed Mcgee of Frost Brown Todd. Different types of transactions and the differing positions of the client are some of the variables to take into account when making this choice, but there is much more to consider.
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