Editor's Note
The American Lawyer
November 01, 2009
Last spring, as we began to plan the 2009 edition of our annual litigation supplement, it wasn't hard to decide what to write about. The economy had been at the top of the news for months. We'd already seen, in the financial figures from The Am Law 200 and the steady stream of lawyer layoffs, just how hard the recession had walloped law firms. The world had changed, and we wanted to know how it had changed for litigators.
Senior writer Alison Frankel gives an overview of the new landscape in "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On." Of course, the downturn itself has spawned a lot of lawsuits — even if, as contributing writer Douglas McCollam notes in "Don't Count on It", litigation hasn't exactly proven to be the countercyclical bulwark against bad times that it was always reputed to be. Some investors who lost money on Wall Street — for example, when the market for auction-rate securities froze up — are suing their brokers. Such claims have to be brought in Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration, which has traditionally been seen as a venue more hospitable to the securities industry than to investor claimants. STMicroelectronics N.V.'s $431 million win against Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC earlier this year, though, challenges that conventional wisdom. In "Home Court Disadvantage," New York Law Journal reporter Nate Raymond takes a detailed look at how ST eked out its surprising victory.
Another suit against a financial institution — but one from an unlikely quarter — is the subject of "Broken Homes," by staff reporter Francesca Heintz. The city of Baltimore, with thousands of houses vacant through foreclosure, has decided to attack the problem by suing lender Wells Fargo & Company for allegedly targeting minority neighborhoods for subprime loans. Baltimore isn't the only city bedeviled by foreclosures to go after a bank, but its suit seems to be gaining more traction than most. Heintz explains why.
If the Baltimore suit is intensely local, some litigation stemming from the downturn is international in scope. Count in this category both the massive tangle of Madoff suits and the litigation between global banks over complex financial products gone bad. Cases like these aren't easily accommodated in any national court. What's the alternative? Senior international correspondent Michael D. Goldhaber looks at the prospects for a world financial court — or the equivalent — in "A Suitable Venue."
No matter whom they're suing, litigators are getting more pressure from clients over fees. Like Irell & Manella's Richard Kendall, who found that his entertainment industry clients were starting to balk at Irell's billing rates. Kendall's solution was to leave his firm and start a new one, cutting his rates 20 percent. Both Kendall and his clients sound remarkably content with the new arrangement. Contributing writer Tamara Loomis's profile of Kendall Brill & Klieger begins here. "It turned out," Kendall told Loomis, "there's never been a better time to start a new firm."
