Law Firms

The Bell City Council will hold a special meeting Monday night to consider hiring a new city attorney, but some residents say one of the three firms competing for the job has an inside track. The hiring of a permanent city attorney is a pressing issue facing the council. The city's former attorney was criticized for not doing enough to restrain allegedly lawless behavior from the town's former administrator and other officials, who paid themselves high salaries as the city struggled financially.

In a highly unusual move, the lawyer retained by House Republicans to defend the law that denies federal recognition to legally married gay couples has resigned from his law firm after pressure from gay rights groups moved the firm to withdraw from the representation. Paul Clement, the former U.S. solicitor general, made his resignation letter public—a decision that telegraphs the size of rift between Clement and his former employer, the well-known Atlanta-based firm King and Spalding.

Like a lot of homeowners, Mar Vista residents Faith and Gary Hunt found money a little tight during the recession and hoped they could work out some more accommodating terms with their lender, Chase bank. To improve their odds, they said they turned to a law firm that said it could possibly cut their mortgage payment in half. They also signed on with a "debt management" company that, according to the Hunts, said it could eliminate their credit card debt. After making thousands of dollars in payments, the Hunts said, neither business would return their calls or emails, and the couple received no assistance with their mortgage or their plastic.

The dispute between Frank McCourt and his former attorneys erupted into public view Monday when the firm filed suit against the Dodgers owner, who responded with a statement criticizing it for "trying to defend conduct that is indefensible. " Bingham McCutchen, the Boston-based firm responsible for the since-invalidated agreement that would have granted McCourt sole ownership of the Dodgers, essentially asked a Massachusetts court to deprive McCourt of the chance to sue the firm for malpractice should he lose control of the team.

With confidential information plundered from some of New York's most prestigious law firms, a corporate finance attorney, a Wall Street trader and a "middleman" bought hundreds of thousands of shares in companies about to be acquired, selling them when the deals were done to net millions of dollars in instant profit, federal officials allege. After each haul — totaling at least $32 million over nearly 17 years, according to federal investigators — the men met in Atlantic City casinos, where they believed they could share their large cash spoils without attracting attention.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ruled that there is evidence that a crime occurred when the Cudahy City Council hired a prominent downtown law firm to advise it on a criminal investigation in 2001. At the time, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office was investigating whether the council of the small, low-income city in southeastern Los Angeles County violated conflict-of-interest laws when it hired George Perez as city manager. Perez, who had been elected mayor and worked as a janitor for the city, was hired by the council in 2000, though he had no professional qualifications as city manager.

Hoping to win a lucrative agreement with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, three data security contractors for federal defense and intelligence agencies developed a proposal to monitor and manipulate the chamber's left-leaning critics, according to recently released e-mail correspondence. Employees of the firms compiled short dossiers on a few activists that included photographs, references to their families and charts of their relationships with other liberal and labor leaders. A review of the correspondence, dating from late October through last week, suggested that the surveillance and intelligence gathering had begun only on a superficial basis in anticipation of a coming meeting with chamber officials.

Frank McCourt has severed ties with Bingham McCutchen, the law firm whose attorney drew up the faulty agreement that could cost McCourt ownership of the Dodgers. McCourt parted ways with Bingham late last month, after Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon threw out an agreement that would have given McCourt sole ownership of the team. The Times confirmed the split Friday with three people familiar with the matter, none of whom was authorized to speak publicly about it. Neither Steve Sugerman, the spokesman for McCourt, nor Claire Papanastasiou, the spokeswoman for Boston-based Bingham, would comment.

Two recent mergers in the legal industry speak volumes about the forces reshaping the business of law at its highest levels. What's also notable is that neither deal involved large law firms. Thomson Reuters, a media and information-services company, acquired Pangea3, a legal-process outsourcing firm with most of its lawyers in India, in November. A month earlier, Axiom Global Inc., which provides lawyers-for-hire to big corporations, bought another legal staffing company, LawyerLink.

The holiday season at many law firms means year-end bonuses and a nice dinner for employees at an upscale restaurant. But things were a little different last year at the Century City law firm of Glancy Binkow & Goldberg, according to a recent lawsuit. At the conclusion of the law firm's 2009 holiday party, founding partner Lionel Z. Glancy took staffers to a Los Angeles bikini bar named Fantasy Island, paid for their admissions and bought a lap dance for at least one employee, a former employee alleges in the sexual harassment and wrongful-termination lawsuit.