Health Care / Medicine
Celgene To Sell Psoriasis Drug To Amgen For $13.4B, Clearing Key Hurdle To BMS Deal
Sullivan & Cromwell, Kirkland & Ellis, Arnold & Porter, Wachtell, and Baker Botts all have their hands on this deal.
* Michael Cohen resigns his RNC position in an email sharply criticizing the administration’s child separation policy. So now we’ve reached the point where Michael Cohen is a sympathetic figure. [CNBC]
* Supreme Court justice arrested on 22 criminal counts and faces 395 years in prison. Obviously it’s a state supreme court, but try to guess which state! [Courthouse News Service]
* Former Dewey & LeBoeuf CFO Joel Sanders was disbarred yesterday. Dewey know who needs a new career? [Law360]
* Forcibly administering drugs to children is bad and the only downside of the royal whupping these jackboot thugs will eventually receive in the courts is that we’ll here another decade of false comparisons from the anti-Vaxxer crowd. [HuffPost]
* Allen & Overy partners fly to America for their annual meeting where they are definitely not talking about merging with O’Melveny because they’ve all denied that and law firms wouldn’t lie to us. [International]
* Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer closing in on a settlement in the long-running $214 million malpractice suit against them.
* Europe pondering a law that would screw up the Internet. Obviously. [WIRED]
* Barbara Jones, a former federal judge who now serves as a partner at Bracewell (a firm where Rudy Giuliani was once a name partner), has been appointed as a special master in Michael Cohen’s case to decide which materials that were seized from his office are protected by attorney-client privilege and which materials can be reviewed by prosecutors. [New York Post]
* This just got really interesting: The anonymous Proskauer partner who is suing the firm in a $50 million gender bias case has come forward and revealed her name. Jane Doe is better known as Connie Bertram, head of the firm’s labor and employment practice in D.C. and co-head of the firm’s whistleblowing and retaliation group. [American Lawyer]
* Veteran Supreme Court advocate Lisa Blatt of Arnold & Porter received a rare honor at the high court earlier this week during oral arguments in Trump v. Hawaii when Justice Stephen Breyer mentioned her as the author of an amicus brief. This almost never happens. Congratulations on a job well done! [National Law Journal]
* The Stanford Law Class of 1998 has the special sauce for producing female deans at top law schools. Kimberly Yuracko of Northwestern, Kerry Abrams of Duke, and Gillian Lester of Columbia all graduated in the same year. [The Recorder]
* Cooley Law School is back in compliance with ABA accreditation standards. Apparently the school is now admitting candidates who appear capable of finishing law school and gaining admission to a state bar (even though recent bar exam pass-rate statistics seem to strongly disagree with that assessment). [ABA Journal]
* This weekend, Sheppard Mullin — and Lankler Siffert & Wohl for that matter — will be pulling for Abacus: Small Enough To Jail, the stellar documentary about the only bank prosecuted for the housing crisis that starred the lawyers who represented Abacus and its family owners. [New York Law Journal]
* In the first year of its merger, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer earned 1 percent over its legacy firm totals. Firm chairman Richard Alexander describes the firm as “generally… pleased.” But not pleased enough to keep Kaye Scholer on its branding. [National Law Journal]
* Robert Schulman is hoping the Second Circuit can get him out of his drunken insider trading conviction. [Law360]
* Texas Wesleyan is looking for a new baseball coach after firing the last one for rejecting a Colorado recruit and telling the kid the school wouldn’t recruit from states with legal weed. [VICE News]
* Now we have sovereign cryptocurrency which kind of defeats the whole point, but whatever. [Bitcoinist]
* Your daily reminder that white supremacists are bad people. [ABA Journal]
* Speaking of white supremacists, FSU Law students have started to notice that their main academic building is a tribute to a segregationist and that maybe that’s a bad thing. [Tallahassee Democrat]
* “I’d like to see in the Constitution a statement that men and women are people of equal citizenship stature. I’d like to see an equal rights amendment in our Constitution.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is all in favor of amending the Constitution to benefit women. Are you? [Washington Post]
* Kashyap Patel, the “primary author” of the House Intelligence Committee’s secret memo, is no stranger to controversy. You may remember when he dropped out of this bachelor auction due to an issue with his license to practice or from this “Order on Ineptitude” after he was berated by a federal judge. [New York Times]
* Duke Law has a brand new dean, and she’ll be starting her job come July 1. Congratulations to Kerry Abrams — “one of the brightest stars in legal education” — on becoming one of the handful of women to lead one of America’s top law schools. [Duke Today]
* The DOJ wants former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s suit against special counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to be tossed, arguing that its only purpose is to “interfere with [his] ongoing criminal prosecution.” Yep, that was the whole point. [CNN]
* Ouch! One Am Law 100 Firm is experiencing that awkward moment when management decides to completely scrub the name of the firm’s major merger partner from all of its branding, just one year after the combination was consummated. [American Lawyer]
Richard M. Alexander, Chairman
Syracuse University, JD
Michael D. Daneker, Co-Managing Partner
Vanderbilt University, JD
Ellen Kaye Fleishhacker, Co-Managing Partner
University of California, Berkeley, JD
