Scenario:A large company is defending itself in a breach of contract lawsuit. In order to prepare its defense, the company requests documents from the plaintiff that include electronically stored information (ESI). The company believes that plaintiff possesses certain emails and drafts of the contract that may refute plaintiff’s interpretation of the contract.
Mayer Brown LLP, a leading global law firm, announced today that the firm is ranked by Benchmark Litigation 2010 in three national practice categories - Antitrust, Appellate, and General Commercial Litigation. In addition, eight attorneys are nationally ranked as “Stars” in their practice area.
Article mentions Mayer Brown’s Global Financial Markets Initiative teleconference on “Reorganizing and Re-Arming of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement” and quotes Richard Morvillo on SEC enforcement efforts.
Scenario: A large, publicly traded manufacturing company is sued by a class of shareholders claiming various securities law violations as well as a failure to disclose the declining sales of one of the company’s manufactured items. The plaintiff class issues a subpoena for documents to a key supplier of the manufactured item at issue.
Mabey & Johnson Ltd, a British company which manufactures bridge equipment, pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court to a series of corruption offences committed overseas and is to pay a total of £6.55m in connection with these offences. On Friday 25 September 2009 the company was ordered by the court to pay £4.6m in fines and disgorgement of profits. In addition, the company has undertaken to pay reparations to the affected countries.
Scenario: A series of privileged communications between in-house counsel and the board of directors was unintentionally produced to the opposing side during the pre-deposition discovery period in a federal action. During the deposition of one of the board members, the opposing side submits the set of privileged documents as an exhibit. There is no agreement or court order on file in the case dealing with the inadvertent production of privileged documents.
In two related cases, a magistrate judge in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma ordered IBM to produce documents from the company’s procurement ombudsman’s investigation of a dispute with a vendor. Accounting Principals, Inc. v. Manpower, Inc., 07-cv-636-TCK-PJC, 2009 WL 2252123 (N.D. Okla. July 28, 2009) and Pinstripe, Inc. v. Manpower, Inc., 07-cv-620-GKF-PJC, 2009 WL 2252137 (N.D. Okla. July 28, 2009) (IBM is a defendant in both cases).
Scenario: A whistleblower alerts authorities that brokers in a large brokerage firm may have violated a number of regulations regarding communications. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commences an investigation regarding whether one broker “tweeted” about a pending hostile takeover on his Twitter account and whether another broker received insider information about the takeover on his “wall” after a client “blogged” about it on Facebook.
On July 10, 2009, investor Frederic Bourke was convicted in New York of conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) and the Travel Act, and making false statements to authorities during an investigation. The allegations related to Bourke’s efforts to acquire interests in the Azeri state-owned oil company in the 1990s. Sentencing in the case is scheduled for October 2009, and Bourke faces up to 10 years in prison and a significant fine.
A company is sued by a class of investors. The investors issue a discovery request for a large number of data files that are only tangentially related to their claim.
The Obama Administration has released a detailed proposal to change the financial services regulatory regime in the United States. The “white paper,” entitled “Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation,” calls for the most significant overhaul of the American financial regulatory landscape since the Great Depression and is intended to mitigate or forestall future financial crises.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ordered Microtune, Inc. and its outside counsel to produce documents from an internal investigation into the company’s historic stock option practices that were subpoenaed by two former Microtune executives who are defendants in a Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) enforcement action. Securities and Exchange Commission v. Microtune, Inc. et al., No. 3-08-cv-1105-B, 2009 WL 1574872 (N.D. Texas June 4, 2009).
The financial services industry is constantly debating the roles and responsibilities of fiduciaries and how they contrast with those of service providers who are sometimes erroneously construed as fiduciaries. In Eurycleia Partners, LP et al. v. Seward & Kissel, LLP, No.88, 2009 WL 1543689, 2009 N.Y. Slip Op. 04299 (June 4, 2009), New York’s highest court shed light on the type of relationship that can give rise to breach of fiduciary duty claims and clarified the pleading standard applicable to fraud and aiding and abetting claims.
A multinational corporation is a defendant in a products liability action in a US federal court. During discovery, the plaintiffs request production of relevant emails from employees of an overseas affiliate of the defendant who are stationed in the Netherlands, France and Germany.
Federal immunity agreements may not bar federal prosecutors from sharing incriminating statements with foreign criminal prosecutors, in the absence of an express prohibition in the agreement, according to a recent decision from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, McKnight v. Torres, No. 08-55459 (9th Cir. Apr. 20, 2009).
A large company is involved in a commercial litigation dispute that requires the collection and production of electronically stored information (ESI) maintained by its offices in the United States, Europe and Asia. During the Rule 26(f) conference, the parties discuss a variety of topics but do not discuss the fact that the large company intends to use keywords to search its servers for responsive ESI.
Scenario: A manufacturing company is sued by a class of consumers each of whom alleges to have suffered damage from a manufactured item. Information about the research and development, marketing and sales of this manufactured item is kept on a number of relational databases maintained by the company.
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