In a blistering report (PDF) this week, a special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program says major law firms were paid millions by the U.S. Treasury Department based on bills that provided little or no explanation of the work that was done. Although it stopped short of saying that the law firms should definitely pay the money back, the report called for the government to “specifically determine the allowability” of $5.8 million in fees for Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; $2 million for Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft; and smaller amounts for two other well-known law firms, reports the Blog…

Stepfather is not entitled to supplement the record with evidence of his 17-year-old stepdaughter’s blog entry; the Court of Appeals affirms a founded sexual abuse disposition initiated by a local department of social services and sustained by the Commissioner of Social Services and circuit court below. The local department of social services investigated a complaint that [...]

When Cory R. Maples heard that he was going to be represented in his murder appeal by lawyers from one of New York's most prestigious law firms, “I thought I hit the lottery as far as attorneys go,” he told the Washington Post. But his case didn't go nearly as well as he might reasonably have expected it to. In a perfect storm of mistakes that weren't his fault, Maples, 37, wound up missing a critical appeal date for his state-court habeas claims. No one told him that his attorneys at Sullivan & Cromwell assigned to his case had moved…

Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court is under fire from Democrats in the House of Representatives. A group of 20 led by Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York are calling for an investigation of what they describe as a failure by Thomas to report $700,000 in income his wife received from a conservative think tank between 2003 and 2007, according to the New York Daily News and Roll Call. Virginia Thomas allegedly was paid this amount by the Heritage Foundation. In a letter, the group asked the Judicial Conference of the United States to decide whether the Department…

It's a controversial idea. But some women lawyers are suggesting that female attorneys do better, overall, when working in-house at least in part because corporations value the people skills they tend to bring to the table more than law firms do. "Companies have tended to reward the kinds of skills that women in general are known for bringing—the ability to accommodate and collaborate, the ability to lead teams, the ability to look for different kinds of solutions," Susan Hackett tells Corporate Counsel. A former general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel, she recently co-founded Legal Executive Leadership. Corporations also…

A longtime Georgia judge avoided prison in 2009 by taking a plea in a federal corruption case. Now it appears that he likely will also avoid a conviction in the case: Federal prosecutors are joining the defense in seeking to vacate the guilty plea of Brooks E. Blitch III to a single count of honest services fraud conspiracy, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2010 that limited the scope of the crime, reports the Associated Press. The nation's top court said that a defendant must benefit financially, by receiving a bribe or a kickback, to be convicted of the…

News of additional errors in some Law School Admission Test and grade point average data published in recent years by the University of Illinois isn't going to make any difference in U.S. News & World Report's annual law school rankings for those years. For one thing, it appears that the erroneous information may have been statistically insignificant, as far as the rankings are concerned, Robert Morse, the magazine's director of data research, tells the ABA Journal. Plus, it's necessary to have finality at this point, he says. Nonetheless, it's obviously disturbing that two institutions this year have reported errors in…

In this dec action seeking coverage from a pool company and its CGL carrier for a girl’s accidental drowning, the girl’s parents and the pool company have standing to sue, but the swim club, as an alleged joint tortfeasor, and its carrier, do not have standing, as the only present injury they allege is an [...]

After eight years, Virginia’s Judicial Settlement Conference program remains popular in parts of the state, but gets little to no use in other areas. The free judicial mediation service is active and well accepted in the Hampton Roads area, court officials say, but little used in Northern Virginia and Southwest Virginia. Overall, for the second year [...]

Updated: A woman who defied a religious and cultural ban by driving in Saudi Arabia was initially sentenced to 10 lashes in a landmark case in the ultraconservative Muslim county. It is the first time a court has upheld the rule against women drivers, which previously had been more informally enforced by religious police obtaining promises from women not to drive again, reports the Times of India. However, the woman driver, whose name is variously spelled as Shaima Jastaina and Sheima Jastaniah and is in her 30s, quickly had her sentence for driving without government permission revoked by King Abdullah…