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Good morning. Pennsylvania’s attorney discipline board says new precedent in a gun ruling should end a challenge to an anti-bias ethics rule. Plus, the latest Wells Fargo legal industry report shows firms facing continued financial challenges; the San Francisco Archdiocese, confronted with sex abuse lawsuits, has filed for bankruptcy; and the New York Knicks just took a dispute with rival Toronto Raptors to a court — of law. Thanks for reading! Let’s tip off.
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Pennsylvania’s state attorney discipline board is touting a recent 3rd Circuit ruling on firearms regulations as the state mounts a new effort to dismiss a legal challenge to an anti-bias rule, David Thomas reports. Williams & Connolly’s Lisa Blatt, the disciplinary board’s attorney, in a letter to the appeals court said the reasoning in a panel’s decision last week to reject a challenge to a New Jersey gun regulation should be applied to the benefit of the board in its case.
The court in the gun case, which was about liability for manufacturers, found an industry challenge was premature. In the attorney conduct case, Pennsylvania’s rule prohibiting lawyers from knowingly engaging “in conduct constituting harassment or discrimination” based on race, sex, religion and other grounds also has not been enforced yet, Blatt wrote.
For months, the 3rd Circuit has weighed Zachary Greenberg’s First Amendment challenge to Pennsylvania’s adoption of its anti-harassment and anti-discrimination professional rule for lawyers. Oral arguments were held in April. The case has attracted friend-of-the-court filings from bar groups and other organizations. Greenberg’s lawyer, Adam Schulman of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, said his client’s lawsuit is “distinguishable” from the New Jersey gun case. Schulman said he will file a response at the 3rd Circuit explaining how the rule’s “chilling effect” has had a “real and immediate” impact on Greenberg’s speech.
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- The nation’s newest law school opened on Monday in Delaware with 20 inaugural students — fewer than a third of the 65 students Wilmington University School of Law officials initially planned to enroll. Law dean Phillip Closius said recruiting students to a school that has yet to be accredited by the American Bar Association has proven difficult. But he said the smaller-than-anticipated class isn’t a red flag for the school’s long-term future. (Reuters)
- U.S. law firms continue to be swollen with excess lawyers halfway through 2023, according to a new report from a Wells Fargo unit that tracked and analyzed legal industry data from more than 130 firms, including dozens of the highest-grossing ones. The law firms surveyed by Wells Fargo’s Legal Specialty Group reported a drop in productivity during the first six months of 2023. (Reuters)
- Plaintiffs firms including Motley Rice and Hilliard Shadowen said they would seek up to about $10 million in legal fees as part a proposed $30 million settlement in which Indivior agreed to resolve a class action filed by health plans accusing the drugmaker of illegally suppressing generic competition for its opioid addiction treatment Suboxone. (Reuters)
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That’s the number of occasions since 2021 that federal appeals court judges attended privately-funded seminars at luxury resorts, according to a new analysis from the nonprofit advocacy group Fix the Court. Thirty-one U.S. federal appeals court judges attended events that despite being billed as educational look more like paid vacations, Fix the Court said. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts had no immediate comment on the report. The group asked the U.S. judiciary’s policymaking body to look into the seminars and require judges to provide more financial information about the trips.
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“Human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim.“
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—U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in D.C., ruling that a work of art created by artificial intelligence without any human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. Howell, in her decision against computer scientist Stephen Thaler, affirmed the U.S. Copyright Office’s rejection of an application filed by Thaler on behalf of his DABUS system, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. The fast-growing field of generative AI has raised several novel intellectual property issues.
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- Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is due back in Manhattan federal court for the first time since being jailed and is expected to plead not guilty to a new indictment alleging fraud and conspiracy charges, Luc Cohen reports. The 31-year-old former billionaire has been jailed since Aug. 11, when U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan revoked his bail for allegedly tampering with witnesses at least twice. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to three earlier indictments. He is being held in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
- In the 6th Circuit, the Tennessee attorney general’s office faces a deadline to file its opening brief in the state’s legal challenge to revive a law restricting drag performances in public or where children are present. U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, ruled in June that the law was “both unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad.” Republican lawmakers across the country have introduced more than 500 bills this year regulating the conduct of gay and transgender people ahead of the 2024 elections.
- Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager at NFT marketplace OpenSea, is set to be sentenced after his conviction in May at trial in Manhattan federal court on fraud and money laundering charges. Chastain was accused of buying NFTs he had decided to feature on the OpenSea website and selling them shortly afterward to make more than $50,000 in illegal profit. Prosecutors described the scheme as the first insider trading case involving digital assets. They have recommended a prison sentence of 21 to 27 months. Chastain’s attorneys at Greenberg Traurig will ask the court to impose a sentence of either time-served or probation.
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Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
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- Businesses that perform employment-related tasks for other companies, such as screening job applicants, can be held liable for discrimination under state law, the California Supreme Court ruled. California state law defines the term “employer” to include an employer’s “agents,” the high court said, and so workers can sue third-party businesses for independently engaging in discrimination. (Reuters)
- An 11th Circuit panel revived a Republican-backed Alabama law banning the use of puberty-blocking drugs and hormones to treat gender dysphoria in transgender minors. Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa, writing for the three-judge panel, said the families and physicians challenging the law “have not presented any authority that supports the existence of a constitutional right” for parents to treat their children with “transitioning medications subject to medically accepted standards.” (Reuters)
- The en banc 5th Circuit said a gender-based scheduling policy could amount to illegal workplace discrimination, in a ruling that rejected one of the court’s prior orders that set a higher bar for proving bias claims. The appeals court revived a lawsuit claiming Dallas County, Texas, forced female jail guards to work weekends while giving men those days off. The court said its prior precedent was misguided, and overruled it. (Reuters)
- Wells Fargo won the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing the bank of defrauding shareholders by touting its commitment to hiring diversity while its managers were conducting sham interviews of non-white and female job candidates. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson in San Francisco said that while reasonable investors would not expect Wells Fargo to conduct interviews for jobs that had already been filled, shareholders failed to show that fake interviews were widespread or even took place. (Reuters)
- Former Bumble Bee seafood company owner Lion Capital can’t dodge a trial over claims from canned tuna buyers and other plaintiffs that the UK-based private equity firm participated in a global conspiracy to fix prices. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw’s ruling in San Diego federal court tees up the case for a trial. The ruling was the latest in a long-running legal fight over tuna prices. Lion Capital, represented by Sullivan & Cromwell, has denied any wrongdoing. (Reuters)
- Manufacturer Johns Manville, a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, must face an antitrust lawsuit accusing it of monopolizing the market for a substance used in thermal pipe insulation. A 10th Circuit panel in Denver ruled that a Colorado federal trial judge was wrong to dismiss the lawsuit by rival Chase Manufacturing. Bona Law’s Luke Hasskamp argued for Chase, and Gregory Kerwin of Gibson Dunn represented Johns Manville. (Reuters)
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