Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman

  • Morning Docket: 01.04.23
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 01.04.23

    * Class action lawsuit filed against Southwest Airlines over holiday travel meltdown right on schedule… unlike Southwest. [Corporate Counsel]

    * Sam Bankman-Fried trial set for October. [New York Law Journal]

    * Kasowitz suing Glenn Agre over fees. Glenn Agre partners worked on the matter at Kasowitz before founding Glenn Agre and bringing the work with them. Now that the matter is closed, Glenn Agre earned a success fee and Kasowitz wants a chunk of that. Does Kasowitz pay pro rated bonuses to associates who lateral to other firms mid-year? Because that’s the firm’s logic. [American Lawyer]

    * Biden renominates pending judgeship appointments. These nominations may have languished in the last Congress, but there’s now a chance they can get confirmed before the next Speaker. [Reuters]

    * DoNotPay, the AI speeding ticket system, is set to defend its first matter in court. [New Scientist]

  • Morning Docket 10.30.20
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket 10.30.20

    * GrubHub may be facing a class-action lawsuit for adding restaurants to the service without permission. Sounds like GrubHub was “hungry” for more listings… [Fox News]

    * A disgraced and disbarred lawyer is set to enter a guilty plea for stealing from 9/11 victims. [New York Daily News]

    * A pastor is facing a $2 million lawsuit for allegedly peeing on a fellow passenger during a flight. [Fox News]

    * A Colorado attorney, who was formerly affiliated with Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, has pleaded guilty to sending obscene and harassing texts. [Aspen Daily News]

    * The former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, who resigned from that office earlier this month, will be joining Quinn Emanuel. Seems like he landed on his feet… [Texas Lawyer]

  • Morning Docket: 03.21.17
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 03.21.17

    * Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it… especially when it’s rumored that you were the inspiration for seminal 80s character Ferris Bueller and you’re now under consideration to be Preet Bharara’s replacement as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Edward McNally works for Kasowitz Benson now, but he’s reportedly a leading contender for the job. [Wall Street Journal]

    * Preet Bharara, on the other hand, is now considering taking up teaching at a prestigious law school — like Columbia, Harvard, or NYU — or going into private practice at a prestigious Biglaw firm — like Gibson Dunn or WilmerHale. Who knew being fired after refusing to resign could work out so well? [Wall Street Journal]

    * Sources claim that President Trump will nominate Makan Delrahim to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Currently employed as a deputy in the Office of White House Counsel, Delrahim previously served in the DOJ antitrust division from 2003 to 2005 as deputy assistant attorney general under President Bush. [Big Law Business]

    * “The noise about lawyers is much more positive right now. Before, it was just negative noise.” Law schools may be thanking our president for something that’s being referred to as the “Trump bump.” Some speculate that applications will surge thanks to the legal profession’s prominence in the turbulent early days of his reign. [National Law Journal]

    * “They say a woman’s place is in the house. I say it’s in the courthouse.” The lawyers at New York firm Meyer-Kessler & Shulevitz refer to themselves “double trouble,” claim they represent the “new feminism,” and they wear bright pink designer outfits every time they go to court. We may have more on this dynamic duo later. [New York Daily News]

  • Morning Docket: 10.14.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 10.14.16

    * Senator Mike Lee, an influential member of the Senate Judiciary Committee (and a former Supreme Court clerk himself), explains why Republicans won’t confirm Judge Merrick Garland to SCOTUS in the lame-duck session. [Washington Post via How Appealing]

    * Jaroslawa Zelinsky Johnson, former managing partner of Chadbourne & Parke’s defunct Kiev office, wants in on Kerrie Campbell’s sex discrimination suit against the firm. [American Lawyer]

    * In other news about alleged gender bias in Biglaw, it looks like partner Traci Ribeiro’s lawsuit against Sedgwick is bound for arbitration. [Law.com]

    * The latest bad news for Theranos: a hedge fund is suing the company for securities fraud, and it’s represented by a pair of high-powered Gibson Dunn partners, former federal prosecutors Reed Brodsky and Winston Chan. [Corporate Counsel]

    * Kasowitz Benson’s recent legal work on behalf of Donald Trump is just the latest example of the firm representing litigious tycoons. [New York Law Journal]

    * As some firms exit China, others enter the market; Hogan Lovells just announced a strategic alliance with Fujian Fidelity Law Firm in Shanghai. [Big Law Business]

    * In my ancestral homeland of the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte poses a threat to the rule of law, but remains very popular with the people. [New York Times]

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  • Morning Docket: 10.03.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 10.03.16

    * The New York Times has obtained Donald Trump’s tax records from 1995, revealing a nearly $916 million loss that would have enabled him to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period. Marc Kasowitz, name partner of Kasowitz Benson, represents Trump, and has threatened the paper with “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” for its publication of his client’s tax records. [New York Times]

    * George Mason University will host a grand opening ceremony this week for the twice renamed Antonin Scalia School of Law Antonin Scalia Law School — a ceremony that five SCOTUS justices will reportedly attend — and some students and faculty are planning to protest the Koch brothers’ funding of scholarships by wearing red tape over their mouths to symbolize their voices being taken from them. [Big Law Business]

    * Katherine Magbanua, the woman who is suspected of connecting Florida State University law professor Dan Markel’s alleged killers, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, with the family of Markel’s ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, has been arrested on murder charges. According to police, she has “received numerous benefits from the Adelsons since Markel’s murder.” We’ll have more on this later today. [Tallahassee Democrat]

    * According to Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida, Orlando-based firm Butler & Hosch violated the WARN Act when it closed suddenly in May 2015 and conducted mass layoffs of more than 700 employees without giving them 60 days of advance notice. The firm, which is bankruptcy, could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages. We may have more on this later today. [Orlando Sentinel]

    * Following the embarrassment that was former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s light sentence in the sexual assault of an unconscious woman at his school, California Gov. Jerry Brown has broadened the state’s legal definition of rape to include penetration with a foreign object, mandate prison time if the victim was unconscious at the time of the assault, and forbid judges from granting probation or parole in such cases. [Reuters]

    * “Frankly, USD has been a bit behind in that, in part, up until 2014, we had no problem with the bar exam. When you’re hitting in the high 80s or 90s, you don’t worry about much.” Unofficial results from the South Dakota bar exam are out, and after years of declines in passage rates for graduates of South Dakota Law, administrators are ready to take action now that only about 50 percent of graduates passed the test. [Argus Leader]

    * “I was empty and then this woman walked into my life. I didn’t think it would happen again and it did. She is it.” LGBT rights pioneer Edie Windsor, the plaintiff whose Supreme Court case rendered DOMA unconstitutional in 2013 and laid the groundwork for the high court to declare that marriage equality was a fundamental right just two years later, remarried in New York last week. Our very best wishes! [New York Times]

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