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A new judicial ethics opinion says that a federal judge who invests in a publicly-traded company or a mutual fund that owns as little as a 10% stake of a party in a lawsuit may need to be recused from presiding over the case, reports Nate Raymond.
Following a 2021 Wall Street Journal report that documented how more than 130 federal judges had failed to recuse themselves from cases involving companies in which they or their family members owned stock, the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Committee on Codes of Conduct this week revised an earlier advisory opinion to strengthen the requirements governing recusals by judges involving parent-subsidiary relationships between companies.
Under the earlier 2017 ethics opinion, judges were advised to recuse themselves if they owned stock in a company that “controlled” a subsidiary that was a party to a case. The opinion said a company’s ownership of 10% of a party was a “benchmark measure of parental control.”
Monday’s revised opinion goes further, saying the ownership of 10% or more of a party creates a “threshold rebuttable presumption of control for recusal purposes.”
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- Chief Judge Diane Sykes of the 7th Circuit has sought to assure two Republican U.S. senators that the circuit is committed to not allowing discrimination after they complained about three Illinois judges’ policies that aimed to give young women and minority lawyers more opportunities to argue cases in court. Sykes sent a letter to Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz of Texas, who have said the judges were granting oral argument requests based on an attorney’s race or sex rather than the substance of the case.
- Kroger and Albertsons have turned to seasoned D.C. antitrust lawyers to battle the FTC’s new lawsuit seeking to block the supermarket giants’ planned $25 billion merger. Kroger’s legal team includes Arnold & Porter Kay Scholer’s Michael Bernstein and Albertsons’ lawyers include Debevoise & Plimpton’s Ted Hassi and White & Case’s George Paul.
- Donald Trump ally Jeffrey Clark has fended off a subpoena from attorney ethics investigators seeking records tied to his work challenging Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory over Trump. The D.C. Court of Appeals said in a brief order that the D.C. bar office that polices attorney conduct in the nation’s capital could not enforce a subpoena in its professional misconduct probe of Clark.
- A Democrat-led U.S. Senate committee voted along party lines to approve President Joe Biden’s renewed nomination of acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su to fill the role permanently, amid growing criticism from Republicans about her record. The committee voted 11-10 to send Su’s nomination to the Senate floor for a confirmation vote after her initial 2023 nomination stalled. Biden last month selected her again for the position.
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That is how much more California attorneys would need to pay in licensing fees, on top of the current $404 annual fee, in 2025 to cover an expected $24 million deficit in the California Bar’s core functions. The state bar adopted a budget that keeps the attorney oversight agency in the black for 2024, but bar staff said a fee increase is needed next year to improve its technology, add personnel to the office that investigates complaints about attorneys and bolster oversight of client trust accounts. Several trustees said they were struggling to understand the scope of the necessary fee increases.
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“I don’t like it, but it’s not sanctionable.“
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— U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez at a court hearing in which he ruled that law firms Latham and Jackson Walker did not commit bankruptcy fraud by opening up a new bank account and P.O. box to ensure that California-based biopharmaceutical company Sorrento Therapeutics could file for bankruptcy in Texas. The judge denied a motion for sanctions, saying the law firms had engaged in questionable “legal maneuvering” but had not committed bankruptcy fraud. A Sorrento shareholder had said the law firms should be fined $540 million for forum shopping.
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- The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a dispute over the legality of a federal ban imposed under former President Donald Trump on “bump stock” devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns. The justices agreed to hear an appeal from the Biden administration’s DOJ of a lower court’s ruling in favor of a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban.
- Hunter Biden is slated to appear for a closed-door deposition before Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives who are pursuing an impeachment inquiry into his father. Republicans have spent months investigating whether President Joe Biden improperly benefited from family members’ foreign business ventures, but have so far failed to turn up evidence of wrongdoing.
- U.S. District Judge Joshua Wolson, a Philadelphia-based Trump appointee, will deliver a talk before the Harvard chapter of the Federalist Society titled “Sunshine in the Third Branch: The Importance of Judicial Transparency.”
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Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
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- OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss parts of the New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against it, arguing that the newspaper “hacked” its chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial-intelligence systems to generate misleading evidence for the case. OpenAI said in a filing that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through “deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”
- Freight rail giant BNSF has agreed to pay $75 million to resolve a class action accusing it of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which restricts the collection of biometric information such as fingerprints and eye scans. Attorneys for a class of 46,500 truck drivers revealed the proposed deal in a filing in Chicago federal court, where the claims against BNSF were tested last year in the first-ever trial under the stringent state law.
- Bayer asked the full 11th Circuit to reconsider, for the second time, a three-judge panel’s ruling that it must face a lawsuit by a Georgia doctor who says the company’s Roundup weedkiller gave him cancer. The petition for en banc rehearing is the latest effort by the German conglomerate to shield itself from Roundup-related lawsuits by invoking the legal doctrine of preemption, in which federal law overrides, or preempts, state law.
- Writer Lance Hill sued Amazon to halt the release of an upcoming remake of the 1989 film “Road House,” arguing that the film violates his rights in the original’s screenplay. Hill said in the California federal court lawsuit that Amazon never received a license to remake his screenplay after he reclaimed his copyright from the company last year.
- The D.C. Circuit rejected a Puerto Rico-based hospital’s bid to strike down a longstanding NLRB rule requiring employers that acquire other companies to bargain with their workers’ unions. A unanimous three-judge panel said the so-called “successor bar” doctrine, which has existed in some form for decades and was last affirmed by the board in 2011, was a reasonable way to protect workers’ rights to collectively bargain with their employers.
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- Silicon Valley-founded law firm Cooley hired the co-chair of Baker McKenzie’s North American class action practice group, Teresa Michaud, who will be a Los Angeles-based partner. (Reuters)
- White & Case added partner Rachel Rodman in D.C. from Cadwalader, where she led the fintech enforcement and litigation practice. (Reuters)
- Paul Hastings hired an eight-partner energy-focused finance team from Vinson & Elkins in Texas, including dealmakers Brian Moss, Christopher Dewar, Erec Winandy, Guy Gribov, Bailey Pham, James Longhofer, Rafael Alvarado and Alex Cross. (Reuters)
- Sidley brought on Randi Singer in New York as a partner in its commercial litigation group. She previously led the privacy and cybersecurity group at Weil. (Sidley)
- Clyde & Co hired Smita Mokshagundam as an insurance partner in Chicago. She previously was at Hinkhouse Williams Walsh. (Clyde & Co)
- Blank Rome added four white-collar defense and investigations lawyers from Akerman, including partner Kathleen Shannon in D.C., and New York-based partner Brad Henry, who will serve as vice chair of the white-collar group. (Blank Rome)
- Hogan Lovells brought on capital markets partner Jonathan Lewis in São Paulo. He arrives from Shearman & Sterling. (Hogan Lovells)
- Braverman Greenspun picked up commercial litigator Steven Feigenbaum in New York as a partner. He most recently was at Katsky Korins. (Braverman Greenspun)
- McGlinchey Stafford brought back litigation partners Timothy Hurley and José Cot in New Orleans. The pair previously was at Hurley & Cot. (McGlinchey Stafford)
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