Recently in Litigation Category

If you are in-house counsel at Bank of America, you likely find your plate pretty full these days.  And that's thanks to a couple of big August BofA settlements and a case that's headed to state court.

Bank of America agreed earlier this month to a $55 million settlement to put an end to claims of former employees of the BofA-acquired Countrywide Financial Corp.  The class action suit claimed that Countrywide breached  an obligation to manage the former employees' funds properly. 

The American Bar Association (ABA) reports that two in-house legal attorneys claiming that they were fired for raising questions about potential securities fraud have been given the nod to pursue their claims as a result of a federal appeals ruling in the 9th Circuit.

In a case of first impression, the 9th Circuit appellate court held that under the whistleblower provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the attorneys do not have to prove actual fraud to bring forward the case.   The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals clarified, stating that "the success, or failure,of the [] lawsuit does not depend on [the attorneys'] ability to show any actual fraud, only that they reasonably believed that fraud had occurred."

So what did the superior court judge, company president, and general counsel say when they walked into a room together?

While this might look like the start of an amusing lawyer joke, The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel's recent interview with the three sheds invaluable light on the role of in-house counsel in ADR and litigation. 

The three were asked to give their perspectives on whether in-house counsel should establish expertise in arbitration and mediation, or rather, look to outside counsel for ADR services.  And, additionally, if general counsel is in the decision-making role of directing a dispute to litigation or ADR, what factors it should consider before pursuing either option.

Medtronic Will Pay Abbott Laboratories $400 Million in Heart Stent Settlement

After ten years of debate and legal jousting for patent rights on heart stents, medical device maker, Medtronic, will pay its rival Abbott Labs $400 million to settle all existing claims as well as to block off any future claims---at least for the next decade.  The bare metal and drug-eluting stents were created to prevent cardiac arrest by scaffolding arteries to keep them open for blood flow.

Abbott inherited the patents and their respective litigation when it acquired Guidant in 2006.  Medtronic and Abbot have since been chasing each other across the globe in the name of vascular stenting--with claims filed in California, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Japan.  The long-awaited settlement comes just one week before trial was set to begin in San Francisco federal district court in a case brought by Medtronic against Abbott.