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A continuing onslaught of legislation and litigation opposing corporate environmental, social and governance actions has created a fork in the road for law firms, with some choosing to scale back efforts and others pushing ahead with their internal ESG and diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
Law firms are being heavily scrutinized for their social responsibility efforts, with attorneys, clients and critics all pushing for accountability. Find out which firms made Law360 Pulse's list of firms that are taking the greatest strides on social responsibility.
Attorney discipline, much like the criminal justice system, is rarely a simple math equation where authorities can plug in a type of wrongdoing and an appropriate punishment is spit out.
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP has added a former Massachusetts federal prosecutor who oversaw numerous high-profile cases in recent years, including the "Varsity Blues" college admissions scandal.
The U.S. Supreme Court will be closed Monday, but the justices will return to the bench Tuesday to hear arguments over whether the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act allows litigants to pursue claims of economic harm tied to personal injuries, and how specific pollutant discharge limits have to be under the Clean Water Act.
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP will get $92 million in fees from a $3.7 billion win in two class actions against the government over risk corridor payments under the Affordable Care Act, a U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge ruled Thursday, trimming the firm's renewed $185 million request.
A Massachusetts federal judge's public comments praising the jury that delivered a conviction and death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev disqualify him from reviewing alleged juror misconduct, the defendant's lawyers said in a filing unsealed Friday.
Girardi Keese's former Chief Financial Officer Christopher K. Kamon pled guilty Friday in California federal court to two counts of wire fraud, admitting that he conspired with the firm's disgraced co-founder Tom Girardi to steal millions from a client, while also stealing millions from the firm behind Girardi's back.
The Ninth Circuit upheld a nearly $14 million attorney fee award to Planned Parenthood after the reproductive health service provider won its suit claiming the Center for Medical Progress unlawfully recorded abortion service providers, saying Friday the award was not unreasonably disproportionate to the jury's $2.4 million damages award.
A Pennsylvania federal judge has ordered attorneys representing a plaintiff in a civil rights suit to go door-to-door and issue written apologies to residents and business owners after subjecting a South Philadelphia neighborhood to a looped recording of a woman screaming as part of an acoustics test last month.
Prosecutors asked a New York state court judge to consolidate Harvey Weinstein's 2018 rape indictment with newly filed sexual assault charges ahead of his retrial, panning the former Hollywood producer's "creative" arguments for separate trials.
The New Jersey Supreme Court has issued an order spelling out the grounds for a judge's recusal in relation to an amicus group, stating that the involvement of a judge's former law firm in an amicus filing is not grounds alone for disqualification.
Chief North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Paul Newby on Friday gave litigants in the state's western counties another two-week extension on their court deadlines as they deal with Hurricane Helene, writing in his order that the region is still plagued by "catastrophic conditions" due to the severe weather and flooding.
The U.S. Supreme Court opened its new term with arguments in five cases, including one over a decadeslong death penalty case and another about whether the federal government can regulate so-called ghost guns. Here, Law360 Pulse takes a data-driven dive into the week that was at the U.S. Supreme Court.
David Bauman, formerly a presiding judge in the Monmouth County Superior Court, spoke to Law360 Pulse about his plans to mentor attorneys at Bressler Amery & Ross PC upon his return to the firm where he began his legal career.
Three outlier megadeals pushed funding for legal technology companies to $1.57 billion in the third quarter of 2024, up from $392.5 million in the same period last year, but the number of mergers and acquisitions fell by about 50%.
This was another action-packed week for the legal industry as BigLaw firms made a slew of hires and a state judge was admonished for lip synching "Jump" by Rihanna in a TikTok. Test your legal news savvy here with Law360 Pulse's weekly quiz.
The D.C. federal judge overseeing the case that charges Donald Trump with scheming to subvert the 2020 election results will allow the public disclosure of some evidence related to the issue of his potential immunity, but will give the former president time to challenge the disclosure.
A former attorney in Washington is accused of embezzling more than $570,000 from a client's insurance settlement after she was severely injured in a motorcycle accident, according to a federal indictment that said the victim was forced to sell her home after her trust account was drained.
A North Carolina county is urging a federal judge to toss a suit alleging that a courthouse monument commemorating "faithful slaves" deemed loyal to the Confederacy during the American Civil War promotes racially discriminatory speech, saying state law prohibits removal.
A slew of lawsuits related to the Gaza war in the Middle East have already yielded mixed outcomes and, in the view of some, contradictory rulings as they've moved through the courts, revealing a tension between free speech and college campus safety while also stoking concerns over the fairness of the judicial system.
A former assistant U.S. attorney left the public sector after four years to join Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP's Birmingham, Alabama, office, this week.
Prosecutors helming the sex trafficking case against Sean "Diddy" Combs told a Manhattan federal judge Thursday they could file more charges against the jailed hip-hop mogul and rejected his accusations of grand jury leaks as "a means to try to exclude a damning piece of evidence."
An attorney representing McElroy Deutsch Mulvaney & Carpenter LLP's former chief financial officer — who is behind bars on charges of stealing from the firm — has asked to be relieved as counsel in the firm's New Jersey suit against the former CFO because he has not paid his legal bills.
A former Alaska nurse practitioner convicted of illegally prescribing millions of opioids, wants a stay of her appeal while she seeks a new trial in wake of Judge Joshua Kindred's resignation after he was found to have had an inappropriate relationship with an attorney in the office prosecuting her case.
Mateusz Kulesza at McDonnell Boehnen looks at potential applications of personality testing based on machine learning techniques for law firms, and the implications this shift could have for lawyers, firms and judges, including how it could make the work of judges and other legal decision-makers much more difficult.
The future of lawyering is not about the wholesale replacement of attorneys by artificial intelligence, but as AI handles more of the routine legal work, the role of lawyers will evolve to be more strategic, requiring the development of competencies beyond traditional legal skills, says Colin Levy at Malbek.
Legal writers should strive to craft sentences in the active voice to promote brevity and avoid ambiguities that can spark litigation, but writing in the passive voice is sometimes appropriate — when it's a moral choice and not a grammatical failure, says Diana Simon at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law.
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Ask A Mentor: How Can I Help Associates Turn Down Work?Marina Portnova at Lowenstein Sandler discusses what partners can do to aid their associates in setting work-life boundaries, especially around after-hours assignment availability.
Although artificial intelligence-powered legal research is ushering in a new era of legal practice that augments human expertise with data-driven insights, it is not without challenges involving privacy, ethics and more, so legal professionals should take steps to ensure AI becomes a reliable partner rather than a source of disruption, says Marly Broudie at SocialEyes Communications.
With the increased usage of collaboration apps and generative artificial intelligence solutions, it's not only important for e-discovery teams to be able to account for hundreds of existing data types today, but they should also be able to add support for new data types quickly — even on the fly if needed, says Oliver Silva at Casepoint.
With many legal professionals starting to explore practical uses of generative artificial intelligence in areas such as research, discovery and legal document development, the fundamental principle of human oversight cannot be underscored enough for it to be successful, say Ty Dedmon at Bradley Arant and Paige Hunt at Lighthouse.
The legal profession is among the most hesitant to adopt ChatGPT because of its proclivity to provide false information as if it were true, but in a wide variety of situations, lawyers can still be aided by information that is only in the right ballpark, says Robert Plotkin at Blueshift IP.
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Ask A Mentor: How Can I Use Social Media Responsibly?Leah Kelman at Herrick Feinstein discusses the importance of reasoned judgment and thoughtful process when it comes to newly admitted attorneys' social media use.
Attorneys should take a cue from U.S. Supreme Court justices and boil their arguments down to three points in their legal briefs and oral advocacy, as the number three is significant in the way we process information, says Diana Simon at University of Arizona.
In order to achieve a robust client data protection posture, law firms should focus on adopting a risk-based approach to security, which can be done by assessing gaps, using that data to gain leadership buy-in for the needed changes, and adopting a dynamic and layered approach, says John Smith at Conversant Group.
Laranda Walker at Susman Godfrey, who was raising two small children and working her way to partner when she suddenly lost her husband, shares what fighting to keep her career on track taught her about accepting help, balancing work and family, and discovering new reserves of inner strength.
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Ask A Mentor: How Can I Turn Deferral To My Advantage?Diana Leiden at Winston & Strawn discusses how first-year associates whose law firm start dates have been deferred can use the downtime to hone their skills, help their communities, and focus on returning to BigLaw with valuable contacts and out-of-the-box insights.
Female attorneys and others who pause their careers for a few years will find that gaps in work history are increasingly acceptable among legal employers, meaning with some networking, retraining and a few other strategies, lawyers can successfully reenter the workforce, says Jill Backer at Ave Maria School of Law.
ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools pose significant risks to the integrity of legal work, but the key for law firms is not to ban these tools, but to implement them responsibly and with appropriate safeguards, say Natalie Pierce and Stephanie Goutos at Gunderson Dettmer.