The growing industry faces criticism. The United States Chamber of Commerce, for example, has said that these investment firms, bent on making a profit, can inappropriately influence cases.

But the practice is increasingly gaining backing from some of the country’s top law firms, which had previously viewed the business with caution. Partners at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Latham & Watkins, Fulbright & Jaworski and Patton Boggs have all fought cases backed by litigation finance firms.

“We have been deluged with investment opportunities from my former colleagues,” said John P. Coffey, a co-founder of BlackRobe and previously a partner at Bernstein Litowitz, where he pursued shareholder lawsuits against companies like WorldCom. “The typical call is from a top-25 law firm.”

Firms have to be selective about the cases they pick, combining a lawyer’s legal sense with an investor’s knowledge of risk. Deals are customized for each case, after a due diligence process that often includes analysis of a case’s facts, witnesses, opposing counsel and potential recoveries. Firms typically put several million dollars on the line.

via Looking to Make a Profit on Lawsuits, Firms Invest in Them – NYTimes.com.

No criminal charges will be filed against a suburban Philadelphia school district that secretly snapped tens of thousands of webcam photographs and screen shots on laptops issued to students.

(AP – Aug. 17)

IPRO Eclipse is a comprehensive approach to the litigation process with a highly scalable database and a case management application at its core. IPRO Eclipse is designed to allow users, from entry level to power user, to manage and review their case data from early document assessment to preparing for trial. From a single interface, users are able to work with case data in a variety of formats including native files from electronic discovery and all image sources. The powerful feature set includes Data Views for tables, HTML, images and native files and batch review management. Also included is IPRO’s powerful production management tool; Multi-language support; a robust Administration component that provides management for the case’s groups, roles or users and advanced search technology. The product’s latest addition, IPRO’s Eclipse Dashboard, is a real-time reporting application that was very popular at LegalTech New York. IPRO Eclipse recently completed a successful 2nd Beta program where reception was very positive for the new offering.

via IPRO Tech Releases Case Database Application, IPRO Eclipse.

Five Miami-Dade growers suing DuPont claim some of the newly disclosed documents reveal a long-running cover-up — relevant documents were misfiled or mislabeled in a discovery fraud.

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Amy Steele Donner signed a show cause order March 17 demanding DuPont immediately produce all documents it had previously deemed unrelated to the Benlate case before her.

She said she would consider striking DuPont’s pleadings if the company failed to comply, which would set up a trial on damages only.

In the following weeks, DuPont’s attorneys handed over thousands of documents.

Miami attorney Robert J. Ratiner, who represents the five growers claiming crop losses from Benlate use, presented several of those documents in court Friday, showing some were directly related to the case.

“Judge, this was an orchestrated design of deceit from the beginning,” he said.

DuPont attorneys denied allegations of discovery fraud.

Donner told DuPont attorneys that they had more than enough time to produce records.

Company attorney Bert Ocariz of Shook Hardy & Bacon in Miami said the judge referred to only a certain class of documents, which were produced. But the judge said her order clearly intended for the production of everything.

“I don’t think you should have narrowly construed my order,” she said. “That would seem you are playing games with the court.”

Ocariz said that was not the case.

Donner did not make a ruling by deadline, saying late Friday that the hearing would continue on June 11.

via Law.com – Benlate Case Heats Up Over Document Accusations.

This case concludes that a patient can have an independent third party “spoliation” claim against a health care provider for losing medical records.  Significantly, the claim is outside the Indiana Medical Malpractice Act and does not need to be reviewed by a medical review panel prior to being heard in state court.  In this case, the Court found that a hospital is required by Indiana statute to maintain medical records and if the hospital violates that statute, it commits negligence per se, making an independent spoliation claim available to the patient.

The Court found that summary judgment was appropriate because Gordon’s mother had established that the record loss was the proximate cause of making it impossible for her to pursue the case against the obstetrician.  Counsel for the hospital has indicated that a transfer petition to the Indiana Supreme Court will likely be filed.

via HIT Blawg: Discovery – Spoliation of Evidence Charged Against Hospital for Loss of Records.

THE MacBook sat despondent while the latest zeit geist technology, the iPad, became one litigator’s primary resource in a recent four-day court case.

A litigation lawyer and blogger, who aptly calls himself Maclitigator, has completed what may be the first jury trial using the iPad as the primary means of getting information to the jury.

The lawyer said: “Apple has created a product which facilitates presentation of evidence without getting in the way and does so in a completely unassuming fashion.”

The iPad, which sits low and befits a place next to a legal pad or other notes at the podium, allows the trial material to appear to the jury as not “overly flashy”. Nor is it “a complete headache and a distraction to the attorney”, he said.

The lawyer used Keynote to upload all documents to be admitted. Blankslides provided a tabbed divider set up, separating photos of the scene, x-rays, medical records, tables and summaries into their respective categories.

As lawyers can use such technology in court, the question may be asked whether this will be the end of the “mega-litigation” described in cases such as the C7 judgement in Australia.

While the number of pages left to be read by judges and litigators, may not change, the format in which they are presented could be overhauled and condensed.

Justice Ronald Sackville described the C7 case, for example, as requiring a “Herculean effort” to go through the pages.

“The pleadings occupied 1,028 pages. The trial occupied 120 sitting days. The transcript of the trial is 9,530 pages in length. The statements of the witnesses’ evidence in chief totalled 3,654 pages, of which 2,041 pages were those of the expert witnesses. 12,849 documents totalling 115,586 pages were tendered by way of evidence. The applicants’ written closing submissions in chief totalled 1,556 pages. The respondents between them generated 2,594 pages of written closing submissions. The applicants’ submissions in reply totalled 812 pages,” it was said of the case.

The iPad solved this problem of multiple pages to a small extent. Photos were grouped as a single exhibit in the case, and all content to be admitted was contained in a single Keynote presentation.

In terms of the hardware setup, Maclitigator said it required a good high lumen projector, a long, high quality VGA cable, a VGA video adapter cable for the iPad, and a silicon case for the iPad just because it gets a bit slipper in nervous litigators’ “sweaty palms’ in trial.

Maclitigator saw victory in the case, as well as in using his iPad.

via The iPad set to solve ‘mega-litigation’ problem – The New Lawyer.

“The sword of Damocles is hanging over class arbitration now,” said F. Paul Bland of Public Justice, a Washington-based public interest law firm. “I think you are about to see a huge battle begin for what the implications of the case are. Consumer and employee advocates are going to take a view very, very different from what you’re going to see from the defense bar.”

Bland predicted that “within a week” defendants in more than 100 class action arbitration cases will seek supplemental briefing to argue that all state laws that have been used to strike down bans on class arbitrations are now pre-empted by the high court’s ruling in Stolt-Nielsen S.A. v. AnimalFeeds International Corp.

“We have already received notice in one of our cases that the defendant wants supplemental briefing to make that argument,” said Bland, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of Public Justice and Public Good in the high court case, supporting AnimalFeeds.

Seth Waxman, a Washington partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, argued the case on behalf of Stolt-Nielsen and other shipping companies. Nina Pillard of Georgetown University Law Center represented AnimalFeeds before the justices.

Hugh Verrier, the White & Case chairman and counsel to Stolt-Nielsen, said the ruling’s impact will be felt in future antitrust arbitration cases as well as in other areas of the law.

“Class arbitration is one of the most hotly contested legal issues of the new decade,” said Verrier in a statement. “This decision is another cutting-edge legal victory by our antitrust group.”

A number of potential class arbitrations are now under way and could be affected by the decision, said Archis Parasharami, co-chairman of Mayer Brown‘s consumer litigation and class action practice. “In an amicus brief we filed with the Court, we pointed out that, in most of those cases, the defendant was referred to a potential class arbitration despite the fact that the arbitration agreement did not expressly authorize, or in some cases expressly precluded, class arbitration,” said Parasharami, whose firm’s amicus brief on behalf of CTIA-The Wireless Association supported Stolt-Nielsen. “Defendants in those cases now have a compelling argument that the class arbitrations to which they have been subjected are ultra vires.”

via Law.com – High Court Ruling May Fuel Battle Over Class Arbitration.

AstraZeneca becomes the fourth pharmaceutical giant in the last three years to admit to federal charges of illegal marketing of antipsychotic drugs, a lucrative category of medications that have quickly risen to the top of United States sales charts. Aggressive sales and promotional practices have helped expand the use of powerful new antipsychotic drugs for children and the elderly.

AstraZeneca will sign a corporate integrity agreement with the federal government over its marketing of Seroquel for unapproved uses, but will not face criminal charges, the people close to the negotiations said.

via AstraZeneca to Settle Case for $520 Million – NYTimes.com.

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Consumer groups say the outcome of the case, Rent-A-Center, West v. Jackson, could determine whether courts have any role in overseeing arbitration clauses in labor agreements, which they see as biased toward employers. Business groups, for their part, don’t want courts second-guessing what they see as validly agreed-upon arbitration agreements.

“If companies win, this really will be a watershed case,” said Deepak Gupta, an attorney for Public Citizen, which asserts that arbitrators rule against consumers 94 percent of the time.

During the past two decades, the high court has generally ruled to strengthen the enforceability of arbitration agreements. On Monday, few justices appeared eager to change that trend, though several seemed to believe that courts should play some role in checking especially egregious agreements. Dallas lawyer Robert Friedman of Littler Mendelson, representing the business side of the case, urged the Court to continue its practice of “sending very, very complicated matters to the arbitrator” rather than the courts

via Law.com – Supreme Court Justices Consider Courts’ Role in Arbitration.