Merrill Lynch & Co.’s top lawyer is confident that remaining class-action lawsuits against the firm brought by investors who lost money during the dot-com boom of 1990s will be dismissed, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters on Thursday. Rosemary Berkery, Merrill’s general counsel, offered the assessment to staff in an e-mail Wednesday afternoon […]

Oklahoma City securities lawyer A. Daniel Woska has never seen a year like this before. Usually, the arbitration expert handles 20 to 50 cases a year for disgruntled investors seeking to recover their stock market losses from Wall Street firms. This year, Woska and a Houston firm have already teamed up to handle 330 complaints,

10.6 percent was the rate of profit growth at Am Law 100 firms in 1999, the last full year of the stock market boom. But the 1.5 percent figure is wrong, too. That was the rate of profit growth at Am Law 100 firms in 1992, the last time the economy languished in the second

The latest claims — which are being brought against the firm by intranet projects manager Shazia Wahab — were reaching the close of an employment tribunal. Wahab has made two separate claims against the firm for discrimination covering sex and race, and discrimination against her as a part-time employee. The Department of Trade & Industry

The Top 20 Firms Last Years Rank 1. Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, New York 1 2. Cravath Swaine & Moore, New York 2 3. Sullivan & Cromwell, New York 3 4. Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, New York 4 5. Jones Day, Cleveland 6 6. Baker & McKenzie, Chicago 7 7. Davis Polk

According to Mayer Brown chairman Tyrone Fahner, the US partners love Maher’s understated British humour (some of them have even drawn parallels with Hugh Grant). They find it “hilarious” when his schoolboy banter with UK partners Sean Connolly and Jeremy Clay suddenly engulfs a management meeting. And they can’t help but wind Maher up about

Milberg Weiss bills itself as the largest contingent-fee plaintiff-side firm involved in securities suits, and it has negotiated well-known settlements for hundreds of millions of dollars with companies including Rite Aid, 3Com, MicroStrategy and Sunbeam. The 35-year-old firm currently represents the lead plaintiff in shareholder suits against Enron and Dynegy. Senior partners on both coasts