Download associated file: KPMG Dismissal Decision.pdf  Attached is Judge Lewis Kaplan's dismissal (entered today) of the indictment against 13 of the KPMG partners in the continuing tax shelter prosecution. ...

The defendant, a member of the armed forces, was tried and convicted of fraud against the United States and other offenses in United States v. Hernandez, 2007 CCA LEXIS 183 (U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Ct. Crim. App. June 12, 2007). To prove the defendant’s misuse of government telephony, the prosecution called a Chief Warrant Officer to testify that the defen ...

Plaintiff sues defendant corporation for patent infringement, and defendant counterclaims for invalidity. Defendant corporation is then put up for bid by its shareholders. Bidders need to know about the litigation, which is material to the defendant’s financial position. Defendant’s litigation counsel make disclosures concerning the litigation to bidders. Pl ...

The American plaintiff in Apple & Eve, LLC v. Yantai North Andre Juice Co., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 44645 (S.D.N.Y. June 20, 2007), signed a contract with the Chinese defendant which contained the following arbitration clause: Arbitration: Any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to this contract or breach thereof, shall ...

Our post of January 26, 2007, discussed whether, and in what circumstances, the corporate attorney-client privilege moves with the corporation's business. That issue was ultimately dispositive in City of Rialto v. U.S. Dep’t of Defense, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 48381 (C.D. Cal. May 25, 2007), but the threshold question was whether a dissolved corporation, onc ...

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b) provides a seemingly liberal standard allowing district courts to revisit non-final orders in their discretion. The Rule provides that: [A]ny order or other form of decision, however designated, which adjudicates fewer than all the claims or the rights and liabilities of fewer than all the parties shall not ...

The patent dispute in ClearValue, Inc. v. Pearl River Polymers, Inc., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 46919 (E.D. Tex. June 28, 2007), turned on the question whether the defendant’s products had a high molecular weight. At trial, the plaintiffs presented no evidence of any tests showing that the products had a high molecular weight (instead, plaintiffs relied on mar ...

Federal Rule of Evidence 201(b) provides that courts may take judicial notice of adjudicative facts outside the trial record only if they are "not subject to reasonable dispute." The plaintiffs in Mississippi State Democratic Party v. Barbour, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41908 (N.D. Miss. June 8, 2007), moved the Court to take judicial notice of approximately 28 p ...

One portion of the Supreme Court's decision in Tellabs, Inc. v. Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd., 2007 U.S. LEXIS 8270 (U.S. June 21, 2007), hasn't received the attention it is due. Apart from the scienter pleading standard which the case articulates (a standard that plaintiffs will likely find more hospitable than they were anticipating), the Court embraced the ...

For years, anyone who has litigated RICO claims in the Ninth Circuit has had to deal with a very amorphous definition of association-in-fact enterprise — one that could (but not necessarily would) be satisfied by almost any contractual relationship. Now, there is a strong argument that ‛could“ has now become ‛would.“ In an en banc decision, Odom v. Mi ...