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Good morning. New data from Refinitiv reveals the cooler M&A market law firms faced in the first six months of the year. Reporter Sara Merken looks at the firm leaderboard. Plus, Twitter is threatening legal action against Meta over its popular new Threads app, and California is proposing to raise its bar exam fees by 26%. A U.S. labor rights board just sued Starbucks, and a D.C. judge has some things to say about a judicial ethics probe. Happy Friday — this week went by in a flash.
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Latham took the top spot in Refinitiv’s latest principal adviser ranking by value of global announced deals, our colleague Sara Merken reports. Latham worked on about $173.5 billion worth of deals through the end of June.
Overall, new Refinitiv data show law firms faced a cooler market for mergers and acquisitions work in the first six months of 2023, when global M&A activity shrank to $1.3 trillion in the slowest first-half dealmaking period since 2020.
Goodwin Procter held the top spot by number of deals, serving as principal adviser on 396 deals worth about $46.7 billion. Latham’s 238 announced deals ranking fifth by that metric.
Kirkland’s 299 announced deals, worth about $158.2 billion during the first half of 2023, moved the firm to the No. 2 spot for principal advisers on global announced deals by value, up from No. 4 during the first half of last year.
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- Quinn Emanuel’s Alex Spiro, representing Twitter, threatened to sue Meta over the launch of its Threads app, a new rival of Elon Musk’s social media site. Spiro in a letter first reported on news website Semafor said Twitter “intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights.” Musk in a tweet accused Meta of “cheating,” as its new app quickly built a following. (Reuters)
- Clark Hill cemented its latest merger with a smaller law firm, saying it has absorbed a 16-attorney shop in Chicago. Clark Hill’s combination with Funkhouser Vegosen Liebman & Dunn is its third law firm deal in 2023, following tie-ups with small Philadelphia-based firms Larsson & Scheuritzel and Conrad O’Brien earlier this year. (Reuters)
- The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee plans to vote next week on President Joe Biden’s nomination of Anna Gomez for a key fifth seat on the FCC. Gomez, a Democratic telecommunications attorney, serves as a senior adviser for the State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. Democrats have been stymied since January 2021 from gaining a majority on the five-member telecommunications regulator. (Reuters)
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That’s the cost California has proposed for law students to register and take the bar exam, a 26% increase from the current fee of $796. Those fees would increase 50% for attorneys licensed in another jurisdiction, rising from $1,197 to $1,800. The bar’s slate of fee increases for law graduates and attorneys seeking to become licensed in the Golden State are part of a larger plan to boost revenue amid a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall. It would be the state’s first bar exam and moral character review process fee hike since 2016.
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If you are an internet retailer delivering products to the West Coast of the U.S., now would be a good time to find yourself regular local counsel, writes Alison Frankel. That’s because the 9th Circuit ruled on Wednesday that plaintiffs can establish jurisdiction in their home states by showing that e-commerce businesses routinely sell and deliver physical products to the venue. The 9th Circuit joins the 2nd and 7th Circuits in giving plaintiffs wide leeway to sue internet retailers, Frankel says. The 8th and 5th Circuits have taken more restrictive views on jurisdiction for these cases. Next stop: Supreme Court?
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“This case really cries out for some sort of mediation.“
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What to catch up on this weekend
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- U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly in Chicago will hold a status conference with the lawyers in a privacy action against BNSF Railway. Last week, the court erased a $228 million jury verdict against the freight rail giant after finding damages under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act were discretionary and up to a jury’s consideration. The jury trial last year in Chicago marked the first-ever under the state law, one of the most stringent in the country in the protection of sensitive personal information. Kennelly ordered a new trial on damages but kept in place the jury’s liability finding against BNSF.
- U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama in El Paso is expected to sentence white nationalist Patrick Crusius to 90 consecutive life sentences for his shooting rampage in 2019 at a Texas Walmart that killed 23 people and wounded 22 others. Crusius admitted to targeting Hispanics in the massacre. He pleaded guilty in February in a deal that meant he would be spared the federal death penalty. Survivors of the shooting addressed Crusius in court earlier this week. “You are nothing without your weapon,” one man, whose father was killed, told him.
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Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
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- Family members of a deceased person cannot sue for wrongful death if the death occurs more than three years after the injury that caused it, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled, upholding the dismissal of claims against tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. Justice David Lowy wrote on behalf of the unanimous court that under Massachusetts law, wrongful death claims were “derivative” of personal injury claims that could have been brought by the deceased. (Reuters)
- Attorneys for L’Oreal and other beauty industry defendants asked a Chicago federal judge to dismiss “vague” allegations that certain hair-straightening products caused cancer and other health problems. L’Oreal is represented by attorneys from Ellis George Cipollone O’Brien Annaguey and Gordon Rees. The company and others dispute the allegations in some 250 cases consolidated in Illinois court. (Reuters)
- Rivian Automotive must face a lawsuit claiming it defrauded shareholders during and after its blockbuster 2021 initial public offering by concealing that it had underpriced its electric vehicles, leading to unpopular price hikes, U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton in Los Angeles ruled. Shareholders could try to prove that Rivian knew it would have to raise prices on its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck because of higher materials costs, to avoid even bigger losses. (Reuters)
- Donald Trump aide Walt Nauta pleaded not guilty at a Miami federal courthouse to charges he helped the former U.S. president hide top secret documents that Trump took when he left the White House in 2021. Attorney Stanley Woodward entered the plea for Nauta at an arraignment. Nauta’s Florida-based lawyer, Sasha Dadan, was also present. (Reuters)
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- Paul Hastings hired two partners from Goodwin as practice leaders. Seo Salimi will co-lead Paul Hastings’ equity capital markets and corporate life sciences practices in New York. Sean Donahue will chair the firm’s public company advisory practice group. (Reuters)
- Reid Collins & Tsai brought on New York-based commercial trial partner Tarek Saad from Crowell. He will mainly represent financial services companies in plaintiff-side complex financial fraud cases. (Reuters)
- Goodwin added technology and life sciences partner Xavier Leroux in Paris and private investment funds partner Krishna Skandakumar in New York. Leroux previously was at Bird & Bird, and Skandakumar joins the firm from Akin.
- Bradley Arant added Keith Windle in the firm’s Birmingham, Alabama, office as a real estate partner. Windle was previously general counsel to multi-family apartment developer LIV Development. (Bradley)
- Anderson Kill brought on Paul Ryan as a New York-based white-collar partner. Ryan previously was counsel to New York Governor Kathy Hochul. (Anderson Kill)
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Modern corporate law firms look and function so much like the companies they serve that many now employ C-suite executives, writes Ronald Wood of Major, Lindsey & Africa. Wood says that young lawyers and partners eyeing longevity must learn adaptability and periodically ask themselves whether the path they are on is going where they want it to go. Here are a few questions to consider.
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