To satisfy PSLRA pleading requirements, securities fraud complaints frequently rely on confidential informants. A substantial body of law has grown up concerning whether, or how much, confidentiality is permissible. The Seventh Circuit’s decision on Friday, July 27, 2007, in Higgingotham v. Baxter Int’l, Inc., 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 17918 (7th Cir. July 2 ...

Under the Supreme Court’s opinion in American Pipe v. Utah, 414 U.S. 538 (1974), the pendency of a class action tolls the applicable statute of limitations for class members. In the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, however, precedent held that American Pipe’s tolling of the applicable statutes of limitations for absent class members did ...

District Judge T. John Ward found serious discovery abuse on the part of the defendants in Juniper Networks, Inc. v. Toshiba Am., Inc., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 50096 (E.D. Tex. July 11, 2007). There is nothing novel in that. Some of the sanctions that he imposed, moreover, under the Court’s inherent power and Rule 37 were not unusual: preclusion of certain ...

The 21-day safe harbor was introduced in the 1993 amendments to Rule 11. There are a couple of wrinkles to the safe harbor about which there is a paucity of case law. Both arise from the requirement in what is now Rule 11(c)(1)(A) that: A motion for sanctions under this rule shall be made separately from other motions or requests and shall de ...

On Monday, I moderated an ALI-ABA seminar exploring Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, 2007 U.S. LEXIS 5901 (U.S. May 21, 2007) (see our post of May 27, 2007), with panelists Chief Judge Anthony Scirica of the Third Circuit, Professors Steve Burbank of the University of Pennsylvania and Arthur Miller of NYU, and two lawyers on the opposite sides of the case in the Sup ...

The American Rule holds that litigants pay their own attorneys' fees. The Supreme Court ruled in Chambers v. NASCO, Inc., 501 U.S. 32 (1991), that the federal courts possess the inherent power to impose sanctions, including an adversary's attorneys' fees, on a lawyer or litigant who has willfully abused the judicial process or conducted litigation in bad fai ...

Summaries. The government in United States v. Dukes, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 15961 (4th Cir. July 3, 2007), offered a financial summary chart into evidence that it did not present to the defendant until two weeks into the trial. It had presented an earlier iteration, but that version was much less detailed. The defendant, who was on trial for sponsorin ...

Third Circuit Judge Thomas Ambro has written an important opinion analyzing the corporate attorney-client privilege — focusing on in-house counsel but not limited to them — in the context of claims brought by subsidiaries (in bankruptcy) against their ultimate parent. In re Teleglobe Commn’cs Corp. 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 16942 (3d Cir. July 17, 2007). ...

The Cayman Islands plaintiff sought to enforce in New York a Swedish arbitral award against the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic ("SOCAR") in Frontera Resources Azerbaijan Corp. v. SOCAR, 479 F.Supp.2d 376 (S.D.N.Y. 2007). Because the defendant was an instrumentality or agency of the Azerbaijan Republic, statutory subject matter and personal juri ...

The issue initially presented to the Court in L.G. Philips LCD Co. v. Tatung Co., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 50822 (D. Del. July 13, 2007) was one of discovery — whether, on plaintiff’s motion, the defendants were obliged to furnish discovery on their advice of counsel defense. That led to the pleading question whether the advice of counsel defense must be pl ...