We made a pledge to ourselves that we would not end the year in a depressed state of mind.  But it has been hard.  We have ended the year in what seems to us to be a concatenation of events — a financial melt-down and two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.    For while we [...]

From:  The American Lawyer The Economic Times of India reports that Clifford Chance is in tie-up talks with Indian firm AZB & Partners — a union that would involve client referrals, consultation, and joint training and marketing. While foreign firms are not allowed to operate in India, and joint ventures with domestic Indian firms are [...]

There has been a spate of blog posts this week concerning the aspects of electronic discovery when U.S. litigation crosses borders into the European Union — an entity with strong privacy laws.  The lead off article was in the National Law Journal which you can access here. Further comment was provided by an exchange between [...]

From:  Bloomberg, December 22, 2008 Chip companies are turning to armies of patent lawyers to bolster revenue amid the worst market for semiconductors since 2001. Qimonda AG, LSI Corp and Spansion Inc. are among the chip companies using the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington to try and block imports of rival products or garner patent royalties. [...]

From: Corporate Counsel, December 22, 2008 Martin Shively directs the worldwide IP operations of Microsoft Corp. But he doesn’t commute to the company’s campus in Redmond, Wash., every day. The associate GC works in a remote office in New Delhi, where he’s been based for 18 months overseeing not call centers, but outsourced patent work. [...]

It seems as if the plaintiffs’ lawyers have kicked it into high gear as the year end approaches. There has been a flood of new securities lawsuit filings so far in December.  Posse List members across the country have been reporting in that many litigations started earlier this year are now entering the document review stage. [...]

We have read the public comments by Peter Löscher (the press releases, the choreographed interviews) of “Siemens endorses clean business” and we agree they were a tremendous help to their position.  And the Arthur Andersen prosecution in the aftermath of the Enron scandal certainly made the DOJ gun-shy on a full court press. Löscher has done [...]

There is an article out this morning via ALB Legal News, a news site out of Australia that we monitor, that covers the legal markets in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, along with parts of Japan, Taiwan and Korea.  They often give us access to their job sites which we post on our Europe, Persian [...]

The U.S. Treasury Department today announced that Thacher, Proffitt & Wood, LLP will assist the Department with its investments in the Federal Reserve’s Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility authorized under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.  The firm will help the Department with investments in any entities for the purpose of purchasing asset-backed securities from [...]

FDIC is going to hire 500 new staff. Most slots will be bank examiner jobs. But those jobs pay quite well if you have a few years of experience.  For details click here. Information on the job postings will appear on the FDIC website here.