Koch Industries has put a division of its Georgia-Pacific unit in Chapter 11 bankruptcy after failing to stem a rising tide of lawsuits by mesothelioma victims who attribute their disease to asbestos-containing drywall compound. Georgia-Pacific’s Bestwall business manufactured the joint compound, commonly known as “mud,” with chrysotile asbestos fibers until Read more…
A trove of data revealing the contingency fees charged by New York City lawyers suggests that in virtually every tort case, lawyers charge the full one-third allowed under state regulations. Researchers at Claremont McKenna College and the USC Gould School of Law obtained retainer and closing statements for nearly 300,000 Read more…
Employers seem poised to overturn an Obama-era rule prohibiting individual arbitration in employment contracts after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a trio of cases over whether New Deal-era labor laws protect the rights of employees to join in class actions. Arguments in Epic Systems v. Lewis and two Read more…
Auditors are paid to make sure a company’s books are accurate. Fraud artists specialize in misleading auditors. So should an auditor pay for the damages caused by a fraud artist? That’s the question that may be decided in a trial beginning in federal court in Alabama on Monday, over whether Big Read more…
At the end of this month, California Supreme Court Justice Kathryn Werdegar is scheduled to retire, giving Gov. Jerry Brown the opportunity to appoint his fourth justice to the highest court in the nation’s most populous state, ending a Republican majority and sealing his influence over the court for decades. Read more…
It was an absurdly large lawsuit covering an absurdly large class: U.S. law firm Quinn Emmanuel wanted to sue MasterCard for 14 billion British pounds on behalf of roughly 70 percent of the U.K. population, which was supposedly overcharged over a 16-year period due to MasterCard’s interchange-fee policy. And a Read more…
The four major professional sports leagues have it. The insurance industry has it. Now the news media industry wants it, too: An exemption from federal antitrust laws so companies that are primarily in the business of gathering news can negotiate better terms with Facebook and Google, which increasingly dominate the Read more…
My latest post on Legal Newsline: Jurors applied centuries-old concepts of negligence and liability to find that Syngenta, a Swiss agricultural products giant, should have known China would reject imports of any farm products tainted with its Viptera seed, which is genetically modified to resist bugs and mycotoxins and had Read more…
However much truth there was in the oft-uttered phrase “hopelessly divided Supreme Court,” it was not the case this term. SCOTUSblog’s indispensable Stat Pack tells the story: – 59% of the decisions were 9-0, well above the five-year average of 49% but below the 66% in the 2013 term. – Read more…