Law Firms

While Jesse Bravo was being treated for schizophrenia at White Memorial Medical Center last year, his wife, Laura, called the hospital daily and visited him several times. But when hospital officials decided to discharge him, Laura Bravo said, they didn't notify her and instead left him outside a rehabilitation center in South Los Angeles. She said her husband, who is not homeless, never went inside and spent days on the streets before being found. "Not knowing where he was was very scary," she said.

Vernon has long spared no expense when it comes to hiring attorneys. But this year, as officials fought back an effort to disband their municipal government, the scandal-tainted city turned to lawyers like never before. The blue-chip law firm that helped coordinate Vernon's political battle, Latham & Watkins LLP, was paid nearly $7 million this year, according to records reviewed by The Times. Over $2 million more went to other lawyers and lobbyists working to defend the city.

U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jay S. Bybee accepted more than $3.2 million in free legal services from a Los Angeles-based firm to fight allegations of ethics violations for providing the Bush administration legal justification to use harsh interrogation tactics that critics called torture, his financial disclosure reports reveal. In his latest report to the Administrative Office of the U.S.

A top fundraiser for President Obama was far more involved in the $535-million loan guarantee to now-bankrupt solar equipment maker Solyndra than the administration had previously disclosed, according to newly released emails. Steven Spinner, a former Energy Department official, was supposed to be recused from the decision to select Solyndra to participate in the agency's $25-billion program to back loans for renewable energy projects because his wife's law firm represented the company.

The Supreme Court appeared unusually sympathetic Tuesday to the plight of an Alabama death row inmate who could be executed because two lawyers handling his appeal had left their law firm without telling him. When a court clerk sent a letter to their prominent New York firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, advising the young lawyers that Cory Maples' initial appeal had been denied, it was returned marked: "Return to sender — left firm. " The 42-day deadline to appeal then expired. At that point, Alabama's state prosecutors and judges took a stiff stand.

What financially strapped homeowner wouldn't want to join other troubled owners in a last-ditch effort to save their homes from foreclosure? But beware of unsolicited mailings inviting your participation in a "mass joinder" lawsuit as a way to do so. Mass joinders can be just another way to separate desperate borrowers from their money — as much as $5,000 or more in upfront fees, according to the St. Louis Better Business Bureau. The bureau warned earlier this year that the mailings are the latest twist in scams that promise to force lenders to modify the loans of borrowers who no longer can afford their house payments or who owe more than their homes are worth.

AOL Inc., which is struggling to halt a sales slide, said Thursday that it retained investment bank Allen & Co. and law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz as advisors. Its stock jumped. Graham James, a spokesman for New York-based AOL, confirmed the hiring of the firms but declined to comment further. AOL has posted losses of almost $800 million in less than two years as a stand-alone company as it has struggled to make money from online advertising and its profitable dial-up Internet business has become increasingly obsolete.

Dodgers owner Frank McCourt on Monday will ask a judge in Boston to clear the way for him to pursue a malpractice claim against his former law firm that his attorneys say could be worth "hundreds of millions of dollars. " As McCourt wages legal battles in California and Delaware in an effort to keep control of the Dodgers, his court fight in Massachusetts is aimed at preserving his right to sue for a nine-figure damage award if he loses the team. He is likely to sue even if he does not lose the team.

Charles T. Manatt, who founded one of the biggest and most influential law firms in Los Angeles and then became a political power as chairman of the state and national Democratic parties, died Friday night. He was 75. Manatt died at Kindred Hospital in Richmond, Va., of complications from a stroke suffered after surgery in November, according to his daughter, Michele A. Manatt. Manatt assumed a thankless task as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, taking over just when the Reagan era was dawning.

A Los Angeles County prosecutor sought a job last month for her nephew from a law firm representing potential witnesses in a conflict-of-interest case she was handling, an action that legal experts criticized. Deputy Dist. Atty. Juliet Schmidt, a member of the district attorney's Public Integrity Division, sent an email to the firm offering to provide case law information "that might exonerate" its clients in a malpractice claim before mentioning that her nephew was graduating from Pepperdine Law School.