 //sli.reutersmedia.net/imp?s=126591700&li=&e=gjjtuyu768@gmail.com&p=33452177&stpe=pixel” width=”2″ height=”6″ border=”0″ /> |
//sli.reutersmedia.net/imp?s=126591701&li=&e=gjjtuyu768@gmail.com&p=33452177&stpe=pixel” width=”2″ height=”6″ border=”0″ /> |
//sli.reutersmedia.net/imp?s=126591702&li=&e=gjjtuyu768@gmail.com&p=33452177&stpe=pixel” width=”2″ height=”6″ border=”0″ /> |
//sli.reutersmedia.net/imp?s=126591703&li=&e=gjjtuyu768@gmail.com&p=33452177&stpe=pixel” width=”2″ height=”6″ border=”0″ /> |
//sli.reutersmedia.net/imp?s=126591704&li=&e=gjjtuyu768@gmail.com&p=33452177&stpe=pixel” width=”2″ height=”6″ border=”0″ /> |
|
|
|
| //sli.reutersmedia.net/imp?s=874768&li=&e=gjjtuyu768@gmail.com&p=33452177&stpe=static” border=”0″ style=”max-height:12px;” /> |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Good morning. Private equity firm Welsh Carson is criticizing the Biden-era FTC’s novel case over its healthcare investments in a bid to dismiss the lawsuit. Plus, Justice Clarence Thomas has a beef with bellwether trials, and the ABA will weigh boosting hands-on learning requirements for law schools. Have a great Thanksgiving holiday, and we’ll return next Monday.
Were you forwarded this email? Subscribe here.
|
Private equity firm Welsh Carson is pushing back against the first Biden-era FTC antitrust suit over a buyout firm’s investments, telling a U.S. judge in Houston that the “aggressive new litigation agenda” raises constitutional issues and should be shut down.
Welsh Carson’s lawyers from Yetter Coleman, Ropes & Gray, Hogan Lovells and WilmerHale argued to U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt that the FTC’s lawsuit amounted to “unprecedented overreach.” The PE firm defended what it called “typical” private equity activity, including “advice, financial support and oversight.”
The FTC in September accused Welsh Carson and physician-owned U.S. Anesthesia Partners, which it created in 2012, of anticompetitive tactics that have driven up prices. FTC Chair Lina Khan has said the agency will “scrutinize and challenge serial acquisitions, roll-ups, and other stealth consolidation schemes.” U.S. Anesthesia Partners also asked the court to dismiss the FTC’s claims.
In a related lawsuit, Welsh Carson and U.S. Anesthesia Partners were hit this week with a prospective class action from employee benefits plans including Houston-based Electrical Medical Trust. The antitrust complaint, alleging overcharges for anesthesiology services, focuses on hospital services. The companies have not yet responded to the lawsuit, filed by law firm Lieff Cabraser.
|
|
|
|
- The arm of the American Bar Association that oversees law schools is developing a proposal to increase the number of so-called experiential credits students must take in order to graduate. The credits may include clinics, externships and simulation courses that involve hypothetical legal tasks — intended to give students experience handling real-world matters.
- Legal recruiter MacKay & Agents sued Holland & Knight in New York state court to recover what it said was a $74,000 placement fee owed to it. MacKay said it should receive its 25% fee for placing an associate in the firm’s Miami office. Holland & Knight in an email that was part of the court record denied it had taken any action on the candidate based on MacKay’s work.
|
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas expressed grave concerns on Monday about trial judges in consolidated multidistrict litigation binding defendants to the outcome of bellwether trials. In a dissent from the justices’ decision to skip DuPont’s challenge to a $40 million jury verdict for an Ohio man who blamed DuPont “forever chemicals” for his testicular cancer, Thomas warned against the intrusion into MDLs of “nonmutual offensive collateral estoppel.” Alison Frankel explains what that is, why Thomas is worried — and why a prominent law prof says he shouldn’t be.
|
“Under the Second Amendment, mechanism matters.“
|
—Fourth Circuit Judge Julius Richardson, who wrote for the majority in the court’s ruling striking down Maryland’s handgun licensure law. In evaluating the law, which requires a training course and a 30 day wait before receiving a handgun, the court applied the test laid out in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen decision and found that the state could not show a congruent historical gun law that deprives all citizens of firearms to keep them from some people deemed dangerous.
|
|
|
|
- The Biden administration is expected to file court papers opposing a bid by Students for Fair Admissions, a group that successfully challenged race-conscious collegiate student admissions policies at the U.S. Supreme Court. The group is now seeking to block affirmative action policies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that it says unconstitutionally discriminate against white applicants.
- A Wisconsin judge is holding a hearing to discuss a court-ordered competency exam for former Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who is charged with sexually assaulting an 18-year-old man in the 1970s. A related case in Massachusetts was recently dismissed on the grounds that the 93-year-old was not competent to stand trial after psychological experts found he had dementia.
|
Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
|
- A cooperating witness in a criminal trial starting next week is expected to testify that a former chief executive of U.S. oil refiner Citgo Petroleum helped a suspected Venezuelan drug trafficker launder money in the mid-2000s, court papers show. Prosecutors didn’t mention Citgo in the filing, but a lawyer involved with a parallel case said that the company is Citgo. A Citgo spokesperson declined to comment.
- OpenAI and Microsoft were hit with another lawsuit over claims that they misused the work of authors to train the artificial intelligence models that underlie services like OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. The latest suit is brought by a group of nonfiction authors.
- WeWork said it had secured commitments for up to $682.5 million in debtor-in-possession financing from some of its lenders, weeks after the shared office space provider filed for bankruptcy protection. The SoftBank-backed company is seeking to address more than $4 billion in debt and unsustainable future rent costs through a bankruptcy plan.
- Bayer’s Monsanto must pay $165 million to employees of a school near Seattle who claimed chemicals made by the company called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, leaked from light fixtures and got them sick. The outcome was the latest trial loss for Monsanto. The company said it will contest the verdict.
- A jury in Dallas, Texas federal court has decided that India-based Tata Consultancy Services must pay DXC Technology $210 million, finding it stole DXC’s trade secrets to develop competing life-insurance software. The jury said in a verdict that the Tata Group subsidiary misused confidential information about DXC’s Vantage-One and CyberLife software for managing life insurance and annuity policies to create its own platform.
|
|
|
The fallout from the hacking attack on SolarWinds and its network monitoring software Orion provides ample lessons for other companies and lawyers interested in cybercrime, writes lawyer and professor John Bandler.
|
|
|
|
