March 25th (Morning briefs): a recruiter loses a fee, reducing the costs of privilege reviews, when e-discovery vendors fail, and Simpson Thacher runs the bailout

Appeals Court Rejects Recruiter’s Suit Seeking Fee From Law Firm

A legal recruiter cannot collect a fee of nearly $730,000 from Philadelphia-based Blank Rome in connection with a merger the law firm first rejected and then completed with the assistance of a competing placement firm, a New York appeals court has ruled.

In an unsigned, unanimous ruling, the Appellate Division, 1st Department, concluded that a series of e-mails exchanged between Mark Bruce International Inc. and Blank Rome approximately 10 months before the Philadelphia firm joined forces with New York-based Healy & Baillie, a 28-lawyer maritime firm with an international presence, did not amount to an enforceable contract.

Full article click here.

Reducing the Costs of Privilege Reviews and Logs

The rapid proliferation of electronically stored information (ESI) and the potentially devastating effects of privilege waiver have combined to create nearly crippling conditions for even the most sophisticated companies involved in litigation. Reviewing millions of pages of documents for privilege and identifying hundreds, if not thousands, of those documents on a privilege log with all the information required by the federal rules and the courts can take months and, worse, cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

When the volume of information to be reviewed is measured in terabytes, the prospect of a page-by-page privilege review seems overwhelming. But when weighed against the prospect of privilege waiver — not simply for an individual document inadvertently disclosed, but potentially for all undisclosed documents relating to the same subject matter — anything less than a page-by-page review seems implausible.

Last year, Congress passed a new rule that was intended to provide a remedy for the increasing costs of protecting privilege — new Federal Rule of Evidence 502.

For full article click here.

What to Do When Vendors Start Falling

How likely is this scenario?

A client company is involved in a bet-the-company litigation. The partner in charge knows that cases have been lost because of mishandled e-mail, and he has made sure to entrust the hosting of electronic discovery to a vendor that he believes is reliable and that has given the firm great references. The partner thinks all is covered — but is it? When the partner reads in the morning paper about a major financial institution betting so heavily on subprime mortgages that it is now insolvent, he hardly expects that it could affect the firm’s biggest case. Then the vendor stops returning the partner’s calls. The partner learns that the insolvent institution was the vendor’s biggest customer, and that the vendor is now shedding personnel and is on the market for sale to stave off its own bankruptcy. With court deadlines for production fast approaching and no progress on the data, what are the partner’s options?

Is this really a potential problem? Yes. Can this situation be avoided?  Yes.

For full article click here.

Simpson Advises on Treasury’s Asset Purchase Plan

Economic experts already are debating the complicated $500 billion plan the Treasury Department announced to buy up the sour mortgage loans and mortgaged-back securities that are clogging the balance sheets of banks and financial firms.  The idea, of course, is to unfreeze the credit markets by removing the bad assets from banks and financial firms who lend money and drive transactions. If you don’t like the plan, direct your law firm complaints to Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, the firm that has been Treasury’s go-to legal adviser since the bailout began.

For full article click here.