Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
Blawgletter's firm handles much of our work on a contingent fee basis. That means we share risk with our clients — and earn no fee if we don't help our clients get a good result.
What counts as a good result will vary from case to case. It often involves a money inflow, sometimes not…
Way back in January 2009, Blawgletter wrote that we doubted a 1995 federal law – a sub-section of which the Second Circuit called "the RICO Amendment" — bars claims, under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, that allege fraud involving credit default swaps and other swap contracts. MLSMK Inv. Co. v. JP Morgan Chase & Co., No.
Say you write a press release. It says your firm just won a beauty contest. It claims you expect the contract to increase the firm's net income by X percent.
But your note to the fourth estate doesn't mention that the deal will raise firm costs by an Awful Lot. So much in fact that…
Blawgletter's friends at Above the Law (and its sister site Dealbreaker) give the scoop on the 14-count guilty verdict against hedge fund master of the universe Raj Rajaratnam.
Make that former master of the universe.
A couple of thoughts came to us as we read the news flash:
…
At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached.
The Facebook, Inc. v. Pacific Northwest Software, Inc., No. 08-16745, slip op. at 12 (9th Cir. Apr. 11, 2011) (affirming summary judgment against Winkelvoss twins on ground they Should Have Known Better — and probably did — than to…
Blawgletter wrote a paper class cert in antitrust cases for a Practising Law Institute program that went webinar last month. Read it here if you dare:
Where to file. From a plaintiff's perspective do you have favorite courts to file antitrust class actions. What are the undesirable courts from a defense perspective. Are there…
Bitey: Snappy, those nice people at The Wall Street Journal put a big whamba-lamba ding-dong on some real bad lawyers this weekend. Won't those shysters not never learn? Right?
Snappy: As if.
Bitey: Didn't you read it, Snaps? It said an awesome judge in Chicago kicked a case against Boeing because the lawyers had told her…
Blawgletter just wrote a paper for an American Bar Association newsletter. It starts thus:
You know that the Supreme Court took no antitrust cases in its (current) October 2010 Term, right? You feel either sad (defense lawyer) or happy (plaintiff side), yes? We’ll have no Twombly,[1] no Leegin,[2] no Weyerhaeuser…
Blawgletter wrote a couple of years ago that the tougher test for pleading securities fraud under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and Tellabs, Inc. v. Makor & Rights, Ltd., 551 U.S. 308 (2007), "would logically mean that the reasonable person wouldn't conclude he, she, or it had a claim until he-she-it learned facts suggesting…
Warren Buffett once called credit default swaps "financial weapons of mass destruction" — and later bought a mess of them.
Why would the Oracle of Omaha turn such a seeming hypocrite?
He didn't. Not really. When he got CDSs, he did it to protect himself against possible losses on actual investments he'd made. A CDS, you…