SEC Chair Says Staff Exits Have Left Holes In Agency

By Jessica Corso

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins told Congress Tuesday that the agency has lost hundreds of employees in recent months due to voluntary buyouts and early retirement incentives, and that some now-missing expertise will need to be replaced. 

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Texas Bar Bans Cos. From Hiring Out In-House Attys

By Ryan Boysen

For-profit companies in Texas can't provide legal services to customers, even if they offer those services on an "at cost" basis, the State Bar of Texas has said.

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EEOC Annual Worker Data Bid Opens With Diversity Warning

By Vin Gurrieri

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's annual workplace demographic data collection window opened Tuesday with a warning from the EEOC's acting chair that employers can't act on protected characteristics like race and sex to try to enhance diversity.

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Insurers Say Legal Malpractice Costs Keep Outpacing Inflation

By Emily Sawicki

The frequency at which major law firms faced malpractice claims held relatively steady in 2024, but payouts on claims continued to boom at a rate outpacing general inflation, according to this year's legal professional liability insurance survey, with nearly half of insurers surveyed reporting having paid at least one claim over $150 million.

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Analysis

Assessing The Design Patent Impact Of LKQ, One Year Later

By Ryan Davis

It's been one year since the full Federal Circuit's LKQ v. GM decision threw out longstanding tests for determining if design patents are invalid as obvious, and attorneys say it's too soon to tell if the ruling will change invalidity results, but it has reshaped legal strategies.

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Barclays Officials Beat Shareholder's Suit At NY High Court

By Sarah Jarvis

New York's highest court on Tuesday rejected arguments that current and former officials of London-based Barclays PLC can be sued under New York law over a series of scandals that have rocked the bank, a decision that sparked rebuke from the court's chief judge.

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Analysis

CFPB's Guidance Purge May Have Limited Impact For Industry

By Jon Hill

The Trump administration's recent culling of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidance may help advance the agency's pivot to lighter-touch regulation, but consumer advocates and even some financial services attorneys say the rescinded policies could still shape litigation and leave companies guessing about the agency's current views.

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FDIC Nixes Biden-Era Merger Rules As House Passes OCC Bill

By Jon Hill

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Tuesday finalized the repeal of stricter bank merger guidelines adopted last year, pulling them back the same day as the U.S. House moved to nullify the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's Biden-era merger policy rewrite.

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GOP Lawmakers Defend Stricter Independent Contractor Bill

By Irene Spezzamonte

Republicans on a U.S. House subcommittee Tuesday pushed for passing a recently introduced bill that would tighten standards for classifying workers as independent contractors, while Democrats feared moving in that direction would significantly hurt workers.

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SEC Says Unicoin Made $100M Via 'Massive' Offering Fraud

By Hailey Konnath

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday accused Unicoin of promoting a "massive securities offering fraud" through which the cryptocurrency company raised more than $100 million from unknowing investors, according to a complaint filed in New York federal court.

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Nextdoor Beats Investor Suit Over Post-SPAC Profitability

By Katryna Perera

A California federal judge has tossed a shareholder class action that alleges hyperlocal social networking service Nextdoor Holdings Inc. misled investors about its projected profitability when combining with a special purpose acquisition company, saying the suit's plaintiff never owned or sold the company's securities before the merger, among other things. 

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SafeMoon CEO's Crypto Talk 'Riddled With Lies,' Jury Told

By Pete Brush

A Brooklyn federal jury was set to deliberate charges accusing a U.S. Army veteran from Utah of conspiring to loot crypto company SafeMoon, after federal prosecutors on Tuesday walked jurors through what they called powerful evidence of the former CEO's guilt.

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Amazon, Apple Get Atty Fees Over Dropped Antitrust Plaintiff

By Bonnie Eslinger

A Washington federal judge on Tuesday ordered an ousted lead plaintiff's counsel in a proposed antitrust class action against Amazon and Apple to pay a combined $223,000 in attorney fees to the defendants after finding last month that the lawyers had failed to tell the court that their client had abandoned the case.

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Cancer Drug Co. Beats Investor Suit Over FDA Rejection

By Sydney Price

Cancer drug company Checkpoint Therapeutics Inc. has permanently escaped a shareholder suit alleging it understated the likelihood the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would refuse approving Checkpoint's lead product candidate, with a New York federal judge ruling company statements were not shown to be false or made with scienter.

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Biotech Stockholders Challenge Director Pay Levels In Del.

By Jeff Montgomery

Investors in biotech company Intellia Therapeutics Inc. stock opened a derivative suit in Delaware's Court of Chancery on Tuesday seeking recovery of allegedly excessive compensation paid to non-employee directors for multiple years without an approval vote by stockholders.

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Music Co. Rips Apple's Sanctions Bid Over App Store Ouster

By Lauren Berg

Musi Inc. and its counsel at Winston & Strawn LLP have urged a California federal judge to reject Apple's request for sanctions over accusations Musi made "false and misleading allegations" in a lawsuit over Apple's decision to boot the music streaming service from the App Store for intellectual property infringement.

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Elf Beauty Brass Face Investor Suit Over Declining Demand

By Sydney Price

Executives and directors of cosmetics company e.l.f. Beauty were hit with a shareholder derivative suit accusing them of concealing declining consumer demand, which led to a 55% decline in stock value as information regarding waning revenues and increasing inventory emerged.

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19-Year-Old Mass. Student Admits To PowerSchool Hacking

By Hailey Konnath

A 19-year-old student at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, has pled guilty to hacking into the networks of two companies, including education software and cloud storage company PowerSchool Group LLC, and extorting them for ransoms, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

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Chinese EV Battery Giant Generates $4.6B IPO Amid Tensions

By Tom Zanki

Electric-car battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. began trading in Hong Kong after raising a $4.6 billion initial public offering, completing the year's largest equity offering globally despite tension between Washington and Beijing, guided by four law firms.

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Berkshire Hathaway RE Affiliate GC To Lead Pacific Sotheby's

By Christine DeRosa

Pacific Sotheby's International Realty, a luxury brokerage firm in the Southern California market, has found its new president in the former general counsel for San Diego-based Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties.

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Former Prologis GC Joins BarkerGilmore's Advisory Team

By James Boyle

After nearly 30 years of helping to build Prologis Inc. as a top real estate investment trust, or REIT, the company's former general counsel has joined executive search and talent advisory BarkerGilmore LLC to help up-and-coming in-house legal talent advance their careers.

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Hogan Lovells Taps White & Case Atty As Derivatives Leader

By Andrea Keckley

Hogan Lovells announced Monday that it has appointed Edward So, a New York lawyer from White & Case LLP, to serve as its head of derivatives for the Americas — touting his 20-plus years of experience in law firms and as in-house counsel. 

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Big Tech M&A Risk Under Trump May Resemble Biden Era

Merger review under the Trump administration may not differ substantially from merger review under the Biden administration, particularly in the Big Tech arena, in which case dealmakers and investors should shift the antitrust discount on M&A deals upward, says Jonathan Barnett at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

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Expect Eyes On Electronic Devices At US Entry Points

Electronic device searches are becoming common at U.S. border inspections, making it imperative for companies to familiarize themselves with what's allowed, and mandate specific precautions for employees to protect their privacy and sensitive information during international travel, say attorneys at Seyfarth.

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How NY's FAIR Act Mirrors CFPB State Recommendations

New York's proposed FAIR Business Practices Act, which targets predatory lending and junk fees, reflects the Rohit Chopra-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's recommendations to states in a number of ways, including by defining "abusive" conduct and adding a new right to file class actions, says Christian Hancock at Bradley Arant.

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The Alien Enemies Act Cases: A Roundup

By Britain Eakin

Litigation over President Donald Trump’s March 14 proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act has moved at breakneck speed, spurring two U.S. Supreme Court decisions already while at least five different districts weigh his authority to invoke the wartime law. Here, Law360 catches you up on major developments in the litigation.

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Injunction On Trump Order Limited To Perkins, Judge Clarifies

By Dorothy Atkins

A D.C. federal judge on Tuesday clarified the scope of her injunction blocking President Donald Trump's executive order targeting Perkins Coie LLP, explaining that her ruling prohibits the president from directing government agencies to investigate only Perkins Coie's employment practices and not the other BigLaw firms.

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'Not A Denny's': 5th Circ. Judge Chides High Court Stopwatch

By Lauren Berg

The Fifth Circuit on Tuesday expedited a case brought by Venezuelans who are accused of being gang members and who are challenging the use of a 1798 wartime law to deport them to an El Salvador prison, with one judge chastising the U.S. Supreme Court's majority for allowing the appeal to move forward.

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Trump Case May Bolster Wis. Judge's Pitch For Immunity

By Jack Karp

The Wisconsin judge accused of obstructing federal immigration authorities' arrest of an unauthorized migrant in her courtroom has a strong argument that judicial immunity protects her after the U.S. Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling, some experts say, while others say judicial immunity does not extend to criminal prosecutions.

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Attys For Alleged Fox Hacker 'Deeply Regret' Fake AI Citations

By Matt Perez

Two attorneys apologized to a Florida federal judge on Monday for filing a motion to dismiss charges against their client — alleged Fox News video hacker Timothy Burke — that contained fake legal citations generated by artificial intelligence.

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GSA Official Gives Mea Culpa On 'Non-Core' Federal Property

By Courtney Bublé

A top official of the federal government's real estate overseer testified on Tuesday that the administration was a bit rash in publishing a list two months ago with more than 400 "non-core" government properties, including federal courthouses, that it was considering disposing of.

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DOJ Watchdog Asked To Probe AG's Trump Media Stock Sales

By Craig Clough

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, on Tuesday urged the U.S. Department of Justice's inspector general to investigate Attorney General Pam Bondi's sale of millions of dollars' worth of shares in Trump Media just ahead of the stock market plunging.

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Dem Lawmakers Reintroduce Supreme Court Ethics Bill

By Lauren Berg

Two Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday reintroduced bills in the House and Senate that would require the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a binding ethics code and create new recusal and disclosure standards for the nine justices.

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State AGs Back NJ Judicial Privacy Law At 3rd Circ.

By Jack Karp

Most states' attorneys general, along with law enforcement organizations and a data privacy group, have encouraged the Third Circuit to uphold a New Jersey judicial privacy measure, saying states have sovereignty to enact such laws in a time of increased threats against judges.

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