4 Companies Led By 4 Firms Ride IPO Wave, Raising $1.9B

By Jade Martinez-Pogue

Four companies across wide-ranging industries — including an engineering firm, a transportation tech startup, a cryptocurrency exchange and a coffee chain — began trading Friday after raising a cumulative roughly $1.9 billion in their initial public offerings, capping off the year's busiest week for new listings.

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8th Circ. Pauses Challenges To Abandoned Climate Regs

By Hailey Konnath

The Eighth Circuit on Friday said it would wait to rule on challenges to Biden-era climate disclosure rules that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has said it will no longer defend, giving the regulator time to decide what it wants to do with the rules.

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Calif. Court Refuses To Block Climate Reporting Rules, Again

By Grace Dixon

A California federal court judge would not bar two new state climate disclosure regulations while a coalition of business groups takes its bid for an injunction up to the Ninth Circuit, saying his perspective hasn't shifted since the groups' last injunction request. 

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Coinbase Suggests SEC Sanctions Over Lost Gensler Texts

By Jessica Corso

Crypto exchange Coinbase is calling for possible sanctions against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission following recent revelations that the agency inadvertently deleted a year's worth of text messages sent and received by former Chair Gary Gensler.

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Fed's Cook Defends Reinstatement As Trump Pushes For Stay

By Jon Hill

Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook squared off with the Trump administration over the weekend as the D.C. Circuit mulls whether to keep in place a lower-court hold on President Donald Trump's effort to fire her ahead of a key interest-rate policy vote this coming week.

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Brief

Microsoft, OpenAI Ink Tentative Deal On Nonprofit Restructure

By Al Barbarino

OpenAI and Microsoft have announced that the OpenAI nonprofit is taking a major step in its development, gaining control of a new Public Benefit Corporation and receiving an equity stake worth more than $100 billion.

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Digital Infrastructure SPAC Starts Trading After $200M IPO

By Jade Martinez-Pogue

Special purpose acquisition company OTG Acquisition Corp. I began trading on Friday after pricing a $200 million initial public offering, with plans to merge with a company in the digital infrastructure services sector.

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Taxation With Representation: Felesky Flynn, Gibson, Kirkland

By Jaqueline McCool

In this week's Taxation With Representation, copper mining companies Anglo American and Teck Resources plan to merge, EchoStar agrees to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX, and Diversified Energy acquires fellow energy operator Canvas.

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Broker Wants DC Circ. View Of FINRA Constitutionality Claim

By Katryna Perera

A broker-dealer representative has asked the D.C. Circuit to review a lower court's refusal to block an enforcement action against him from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority despite his claims that the pending in-house hearing is unconstitutional under the U.S. Supreme Court's Jarkesy decision.

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SEC Employee Traded Prohibited Crypto Stock, IG Says

By Jessica Corso

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's internal watchdog said on Friday that an agency employee earned more than $200,000 trading a cryptocurrency-related stock that he was prohibited from holding.

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Bitcoin Miner Hut 8 Beats Some Merger Disclosure Suit Claims

By Katryna Perera

A New York federal judge on Friday dismissed a majority of the claims in a suit alleging that bitcoin miner Hut 8 Corp. overpaid for a company with severe operational issues and misled investors about energy and connectivity failures at a Texas facility that was part of the merger, finding that many of the challenged statements in the suit are inactionable.

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UBS Can't Slip Blockchain Company's Spoofing Claims

By Emilie Ruscoe

UBS' investment banking division can't shed claims that it manipulated trading prices for a software company by means of spoofing, or placing trades it later canceled, though a Manhattan federal judge on Friday tossed the software company's allegations relating to the alleged scheme's long-term effect on its trading prices.

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Mass. AG Says KalshiEX Running Betting Platform In Disguise

By Julie Manganis

Online "prediction market" KalshiEX LLC was hit on Friday with a lawsuit by Massachusetts regulators alleging the New York-based company is running what amounts to an unlicensed sports betting platform.

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SEC Seeks $160K From Ex-NFL Player For Insider Trading

By Sydney Price

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Friday that former NFL player Jack Brewer should pay $160,000 in disgorgement, civil penalties and interest as a remedy for illegal insider trading.

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McGinn Smith Cos. To Pay $44M To End Obama-Era SEC Suit

By Emilie Ruscoe

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's long-running litigation over the McGinn Smith Ponzi scheme has wrapped up after a federal judge entered a $44.2 million judgment against entities accused of running a $125 million fraud that went bust in 2010.

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Title Group Says FinCEN Erred In Rule On All-Cash Resi Deals

By Nate Beck

The American Land Title Association told a Florida federal judge that the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network underestimated the costs and overestimated the benefits of a rule imposing new reporting requirements on all-cash residential real estate transactions.

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French Court Rejects Russian Businesswoman's $100M Claim

By Joyce Hanson

A French appeals court has refused to revive a Russian businesswoman's $100 million claim against Kuwait after she was sentenced to more than two decades of hard labor in the Persian Gulf country for purportedly embezzling public funds.

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Firm Says Lender In 'Falsified' Loan Suit Wasn't A Client

By Brian Steele

Pullman & Comley LLC has told a Connecticut state judge it should not have to face a New York lender's claims in a legal malpractice case accusing the multistate law firm of failing to flag allegedly falsified $16.2 million loan documents because the plaintiff was not its client.

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Parsing Trump Admin's First 6 Months Of SEC Enforcement

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement results for the first six months of the Trump administration show substantially fewer new enforcement actions compared to the same period under the previous administration, but indicate a clear focus on traditional fraud schemes affecting retail investors, say attorneys at King & Spalding.

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Agentic AI Puts A New Twist On Attorney Ethics Obligations

As lawyers increasingly use autonomous artificial intelligence agents, disciplinary authorities must decide whether attorney responsibility for an AI-caused legal ethics violation is personal or supervisory, and firms must enact strong policies regarding agentic AI use and supervision, says Grace Wynn at HWG.

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Ex-Epstein Prosecutor Maurene Comey Sues DOJ Over Firing

By Emily Sawicki

Maurene Comey, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who brought high-profile criminal cases against the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and Sean "Diddy" Combs, sued the Justice Department on Monday alleging her abrupt July firing came "solely or substantially" because she is the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, a Trump critic.

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Feds Urge 3rd Circ. To Restore NJ US Atty's Authority

By Emily Sawicki

The federal government has urged the Third Circuit to reverse a district court ruling disqualifying acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba from prosecuting two criminal cases in New Jersey after the clock allegedly ran out on her interim term, arguing that her appointment is valid and that the court erred in its interpretation of the statute.

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Calif. Court Issues AI Hallucinations 'Warning,' Sanctions Atty

By Y. Peter Kang

A California appeals court has issued a published opinion "as a warning" to Golden State attorneys to personally review case law quotations made by generative artificial intelligence, and imposed a $10,000 monetary sanction on plaintiff's counsel in an otherwise straightforward appeal in an employment case.

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Fired DOJ Deputy Says Lobbyists 'Playing Dangerous Game'

By Bryan Koenig

A former top Justice Department Antitrust Division deputy, allegedly fired for opposing the "pay-to-play" settlement clearing Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks, had a warning Monday for the lobbyists he said made the deal possible: there are only so many times they can go over division leadership.

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Stradley Ronon Aims To Toss Keesal Young's Poaching Suit

By Emma Cueto

Stradley Ronon Stevens & Young LLP has moved to nix a suit by California firm Keesal Young & Logan, saying its recruitment of 10 former Keesal Young attorneys was entirely above board and that the noncompete clauses in Keesal Young's partnership agreement were not allowed under California law.

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3 Law Firms Want Ford's 'Thermonuclear' RICO Suit Snuffed

By Linda Chiem

Knight Law Group LLP, the Altman Law Group and Wirtz Law APC have urged a California federal judge to dismantle Ford Motor Co.'s racketeering lawsuit accusing the firms of overzealous billing and conspiring to dupe unsuspecting clients in product liability and personal injury cases against automakers.

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Software Co. Defends Contempt Order Against Womble Atty

By Abigail Harrison

A North Carolina federal court fairly held Womble Bond Dickinson partner Pressly Millen in contempt after he and his client made misrepresentations in a "parallel" trademark dispute abroad, U.S.-based software company Dmarcian Inc. told the Fourth Circuit on Friday.

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BREAKING: DC Circ. Says Fed's Cook Can Keep Job For Now

By Jon Hill

A D.C. Circuit panel said Monday that Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook can remain on the central bank's board while challenging President Donald Trump's effort to fire her, potentially clearing the way for her to participate in a key interest-rate policy vote this week.

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Senate Confirms Top Trump Economist To Federal Reserve

By Jon Hill

The U.S. Senate narrowly confirmed top White House economist Stephen Miran to the Federal Reserve Board on Monday, giving President Donald Trump a close ally at the central bank as he pushes for greater control over the traditionally independent body.

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DC Circ. Won't Stay District Court's Order On Quick Removals

By Jared Foretek

The D.C. Circuit declined to stay a district judge's suspension of specific U.S. Department of Homeland Security actions implementing expedited removal of noncitizen parolees Friday, saying that the government faces no irreparable harm from the order because it has separate, pre-existing regulatory authority to quickly deport parolees.

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Catching Up With Delaware's Chancery Court

By Katryna Perera and Jeff Montgomery

Delaware's governor weighed in on a challenge to recently approved state legislation that bars damages or "equitable" relief for some controlling stockholder or going-private deals. Meanwhile, Moelis told the Delaware Supreme Court that the struck-down stockholder agreement that triggered that legislation was valid. Additionally, one of two newly funded magistrates' posts in the Chancery Court has been filled.

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