Judge OKs DOJ Bid To Drop Boeing 737 Max Conspiracy Case

By Linda Chiem

A Texas federal judge on Thursday dismissed the 737 Max criminal conspiracy case against Boeing, saying the court's hands are tied if the U.S. Department of Justice declines to prosecute the company, but noted that a $1.1 billion nonprosecution agreement still doesn't fully hold Boeing accountable.

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Amid Investor Cheers, Musk Gets His $1 Trillion Pay Package

By Sue Reisinger

In a landmark vote that turned corporate governance on its head, Tesla Inc. shareholders on Thursday thumbed their noses at both Delaware Chancery Court and top proxy advisers by awarding CEO Elon Musk an estimated $1 trillion compensation package, according to preliminary results.

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8th Circ. Won't Rehear EEOC Harassment Case Against BNSF

By Patrick Hoff

The Eighth Circuit said it won't rethink its decision to restore classwide claims in a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit claiming BNSF Railway Co. failed to protect female workers from verbal abuse and unwanted sexual advances.

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Justices Say Trump Admin Can Implement Trans Passport Ban

By Katie Buehler

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the U.S. Department of State can stop issuing passports to transgender and nonbinary individuals that reflect their gender identity, lifting a nationwide order that required the Trump administration to continue the longtime policy pending litigation.

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White & Case Leads Restructured Mexican Airline's $223M IPO

By Jade Martinez-Pogue

Mexican airline Aeroméxico began trading publicly on Thursday after raising $223 million in its initial public offering, also announcing that it had raised an additional $25 million in a private placement.

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Wash. Justices Spurn Alaska Airlines' Worker Illness Stance

By Rachel Riley

The Washington Supreme Court on Thursday sided with an Alaska Airlines employee who caught COVID-19 while traveling on the job, rejecting the employer's attempt to distinguish an occupational disease covered by state workers' compensation law from any sickness that develops during a work trip.

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Auto Parts Co. Cheated Drivers Out Of Wages, Court Told

By Irene Spezzamonte

An automotive parts retailer paid drivers based on how long a specific route was supposed to take, not how much they actually worked, a former employee said in a proposed class and collective action filed in North Carolina federal court.

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Towing Co. Appeals Motorcyclist's $45M Crash Verdict

By Brian Steele

A Connecticut towing company has challenged a judge's decision to leave intact a $45 million award to a Marine Corps reservist who was paralyzed in a motorcycle crash, elevating the case to the state's intermediate-level appeals court.

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EchoStar Sells Spectrum Licenses To SpaceX In $2.6B Deal

By Jade Martinez-Pogue

Telecommunications company EchoStar, led by White & Case LLP, announced Thursday that it agreed to sell certain licenses to Elon Musk-controlled SpaceX in a $2.6 billion stock deal that builds on a previous agreement they entered into earlier this year.

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Verizon Gets Backup In Fight Against Stewart Terminating IPR

By Adam Lidgett

Patent quality advocacy group Askeladden LLC has backed Verizon's appeal of former acting U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director Coke Morgan Stewart's decision to wipe out a Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision in the telecom company's favor invalidating an Omega Patents patent.

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Brief

US Seeks Quick Input On Suspension Of China Trade Actions

By Dylan Moroses

The U.S. trade representative has given interested stakeholders just over 24 hours to comment on the one-year suspension of Section 301 trade actions against the Chinese maritime, logistics and shipbuilding industries, a move that was part of the recently announced U.S.-China trade truce, according to a notice published Thursday.

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SD Tribe Says Time Is Right To Fight Dakota Access Pipeline

By Crystal Owens

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is asking the D.C. Circuit to reverse a lower court's order dismissing its challenge that looked to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, telling the court it is presenting a live, justiciable controversy regarding the federal government's failure to fulfill mandatory statutory obligations.

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Amazon Taps Crowell & Moring Partner For Aviation Biz

By Gina Kim

Aviation expert and former U.S. Department of Transportation senior trial attorney Amna Arshad has joined Amazon as an associate general counsel in charge of the legal teams for its worldwide aviation business, after spending the last year and a half in the aviation and transportation practices at Crowell & Moring LLP.

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Series

Mindfulness Meditation Makes Me A Better Lawyer

Mindful meditation enables me to drop the ego, and in helping me to keep sight of what’s important, permits me to learn from the other side and become a reliable counselor, says Roy Wyman at Bass Berry.

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Delaware Fee Inflation Worries Overblown, Study Says

By Jeff Montgomery

A newly published report by two Stanford University researchers asserts that high-dollar attorney fee awards in Delaware courts make up "a very small minority of cases" and are "no basis for concern," throwing cold water on growing worries about so-called fee inflation in the First State.

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'It's A War, Man': Trump's Deputy AG Unloads On Judges, Bars

By Jeff Overley

The U.S. Department of Justice is in "a war" with federal judges who are "not following the law," and it is separately formulating plans to block "activist, obnoxious" bar associations from assessing ethics complaints against government lawyers, a top DOJ official said Friday.

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Jeffer Mangels Hit With Pregnancy Bias Suit By Ex-Associate

By Hailey Konnath

A former Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP associate has accused the firm of discriminating against women, especially pregnant women, claiming that she was harassed throughout her pregnancy and eventually fired after she advocated for herself and pointed out the disparate treatment.

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In Case You Missed It: Hottest Firms And Stories On Law360

For those who missed out, here's a look back at the law firms, stories and expert analyses that generated the most buzz on Law360 last week.

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Ex-Calif. Judge Seeks To Toss Sex Assault, Coverup Charges

By Craig Clough

A former California state judge on Friday moved to toss federal criminal charges alleging that he sexually assaulted a court employee and lied to investigators, saying the employee was not under his direct supervision so he could not have been acting under the "color of law" when the alleged assault occurred.

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Ex-Polsinelli Atty Agrees To Dismiss Sexual Harassment Case

By Hailey Konnath

A former Polsinelli PC equity shareholder agreed to drop her suit alleging two former partners sexually harassed her, and she was fired after reporting it, according to a notice filed Friday in Washington, D.C., federal court.

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Mass. Federal Judge Mark Wolf Retires After 40 Years

By Chris Villani

Senior U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf on Friday announced that he is retiring after more than 40 years on the federal bench, having presided over some of the most notable cases in Massachusetts federal court over the past four decades.

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Hearing Officer Clears Mass. Judge Of Aiding ICE Escape

By Julie Manganis

A hearing officer has concluded that Massachusetts state court Justice Shelley Richmond Joseph was not aware of a plan to allow a defendant to evade an ICE agent waiting at a suburban Boston court in 2018, but is recommending a public reprimand for other actions the judge took that day.

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Roundup

UK Litigation Roundup: Here's What You Missed In London

By Max Austin

This past week in London has seen Big Technologies file fresh claims against its ousted chief executive, West Ham United FC sue Arthur J. Gallagher Insurance for breach of duty, and RSM UK face a new claim over a company's administration. Here, Law360 looks at these and other new claims in the U.K. 

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Del. Federal Court Won't Keep Trump's Interim US Atty In Role

By Jack Karp

Delaware's federal court will not appoint the district's current interim U.S. attorney and President Donald Trump's choice for that position to remain in the role, according to a notice from the district's chief judge.

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DOJ Backs Trump In NY False-Records Conviction Appeal

By Emily Sawicki

The U.S. Department of Justice is throwing its support behind President Donald Trump's effort to overturn his New York criminal conviction for falsifying business records, filing a proposed amicus brief on Friday citing the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2024 decision "defining the contours of a president's federal constitutional immunity from criminal prosecution."

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Brief

Pension Corp. Installs EEOC Ex-Chair Dhillon As Director

By Kellie Mejdrich

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. swore in former U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chair and commissioner Janet Dhillon as the 17th director of the federal agency, which runs two insurance programs backstopping the nation's single and multiemployer defined-benefit pension plans.

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GC Cheat Sheet: The Hottest Corporate News Of The Week

By Sue Reisinger

The federal judge overseeing Epic Games' antitrust suit against Google Inc. has doubts about their settlement deal and is asking for more evidence. And a Black McDonald's executive, who claimed he was fired for confronting his CEO over a racial comment, has lost his bias suit. These are some of the stories in corporate legal news you may have missed in the past week.

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Law360's Legal Lions Of The Week

By Kevin Penton

Latham & Watkins LLP and Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak & Stewart PC lead this week's edition of Law360 Legal Lions, after the Eighth Circuit vacated a National Labor Relations Board ruling that Home Depot illegally forced out a worker who showed support for Black Lives Matter.

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Shutdown, Funding Crisis Leave Federal Defenders Unpaid

By Courtney Bublé

The record-long government shutdown has hindered an already dire funding situation for the federal defense community, but now the judiciary is working on requests to Congress to alleviate that.

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Analysis

How One Law Firm Got Two Big White-Collar Wins In 48 Hours

By Phillip Bantz

The white-collar team at Dykema Gossett PLLC secured back-to-back dismissals of two criminal cases in as many days last month by challenging the government's experts, flagging discovery issues and hammering on other perceived weaknesses in the prosecutions.

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