(FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 6/22/15)
Transactional Work on
The Rise at Law Firms
With litigation work stagnating, law firms are increasingly
turning to the transactional side to keep revenue rising.
M&A, real estate, tax and other general transactional
corporate work now make up 32% of billings, according to new data
collected by Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor and Legal Executive
Institute.
Litigation, meanwhile, makes up 36%, a proportion that has been
on the decline for years. "Litigation is said to be
countercyclical, so after the great recession we would have
expected to see an increase in litigation work. But we didn't see
that," said Jennifer Roberts, a senior data analyst at Thomson
Reuters.
Peer Monitor's numbers are pulled from the time and billing
systems of 141 firms, including around half of the nation's 200
largest firms.
-- Sara Randazzo
Appeals Court Blesses
Google-Generated Evidence
In the latest example of judges blessing machine-made proof, a
federal appeals court said that satellite images produced by Google
can be used as evidence in a criminal case.
Border Patrol agents arrested Paciano Lizarraga-Tirado in
Arizona near the U.S.-Mexico border in 2013 and charged him with
re-entering the country illegally, after he was removed in
2012.
Mr. Lizarraga-Tirado argued at trial that Border Patrol agents
inadvertently crossed into Mexico to make the arrest. One of the
arresting agents, however, recorded the coordinates of the arrest
using a hand-held GPS device.
To illustrate the location of those coordinates, which placed
the arrest on the U.S. side of the border, the government
introduced the Google Earth satellite image at Mr.
Lizarraga-Tirado's trial. He was convicted last July.
In his appeal in the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit, Mr.
Lizarraga-Tirado argued that the satellite image and the digital
tack amounted to hearsay.
The Ninth Circuit panel, in a ruling written by Judge Alex
Kozinski on Thursday, disagreed, joining several other federal
appeals courts that have held that machine-generated data aren't
hearsay.
-- Joe Palazzolo
Court Takes Pass on Reach
Of U.S. Antitrust Law
The Supreme Court has signaled no interest in considering the
reach of U.S. antitrust law to sanction foreign defendants for
price-fixing activities that take place overseas.
The high court, in brief written orders, last week turned away
two appeals stemming from a price-fixing scheme to set and control
prices for liquid-crystal-display panels used in consumer
electronics like monitors, phones and laptops.
One appeal, brought by Taiwanese technology company AU Optronics
Corp. and a pair of former top executives, argued U.S. courts had
extended American antitrust law too broadly into foreign
jurisdictions.
The other, in a private civil lawsuit by Motorola Mobility, went
in the opposite direction. The phone maker argued judges hadn't
extended U.S. law far enough to protect the U.S. market from
price-fixing in other countries.
-- Brent Kendall
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