Wake Up Call: Blank Rome to Start Next Chapter As Dickstein Shapiro to Dissolve

• Philadelphia-based Blank Rome has hired over 100 lawyers and staff from the smaller Dickstein Shapiro of Washington, creating a 620-plus lawyer firm in a deal Blank Rome chairman Alan Hoffman described as “not a merger”. (Big Law Business)

• A Washington litigation shop is suing an e-discovery company in a fight over who should be on the hook for $3 million in fees for e-discovery services that a federal judge ruled were “unreasonable.” (National Law Journal)

• Airbnb Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and TaskRabbit Inc. are leading a 47-company firm push to persuade European Union leaders that the so-called sharing economy will boost jobs and growth across the 28-country bloc andshouldn’t be “unnecessarily limited “by piecemeal national laws. (Bloomberg News)

• Dedicating more cash, agents, lawyers and accountants to their hunt for bribes paid overseas , U.S. authorities are warning corporations to cooperate by “self-reporting” corruption — or else. (Big Law Business/Bloomberg News)

Legal Market

• A new advocacy group aims to improve the status of Wall Street whistle-blowers, which have often been ostracized and fired and are not always backed up by authorities. (New York Times)

• After years of shrinking and recent failed merger talks with other firms, “Dickstein Shapiro is no longer engaged in the practice of law,” according to the firm. (National Law Journal)

• Irell & Manella’s gross revenue plunged 19.2 percent in 2015, after a nearly 21 percent drop in the California firm’s lawyer headcount for the year. (The Recorder)

• Capping an awful week of legal losses for manufacturing giant 3M Co., a federal court ordered the company to pay triple the amount of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan’s legal fees linked to an antitrust case against what the court deemed 3M’s fraudulent patent claim. (The Recorder)

• Law firm Polsinelli, which has 750 attorneys in 18 offices nationwide, is moving to new offices in New York City , a 40,000 square-foot space at 600 Third Avenue. (Real Estate Weekly)

Laterals and Moves

• A JPMorgan Chase executive and assistant general counsel, Jean Lee, has been hired to lead the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, which is dedicated to improving diversity in the legal profession. (Big Law Business)

• Mayer Brown has picked up Perry Yam, who was head of private equity at Reed Smith, to manage its practice in London. (The Lawyer)

• In a new lateral expansion, Holland & Knight announced a new office in Charlotte, North Carolina, to be managed by banking and corporate finance lawyers it snatched from other firms. (American Lawyer)

• Big Four accountancy firm EY has expanded its UK legal services offering in technology and financial tech with the hire of Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co co-chair of technology Richard Goold as a partner. (The Lawyer)

• 2016 outlook : the market for lateral partners is as strong as ever and is not likely to change any time soon, and other forecasts for Big Law, in a video produced by legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa. (Big Law Business)

Technology

• The biggest U.S. banks, including Bank of America, and payments networks such as MasterCard, are applying for an increasing number of patents , in an effort to head off Silicon Valley upstarts looking to disrupt the financial-services industry. (Big Law Business/Bloomberg Business)

• The legal profession has lagged in making use of rapid advances in the capacity of technologies such as e-Discovery and technology assisted review, but exponential growth of data will increase pressure on corporate counsel to better use such technology, says an executive at legal technology company kCura. (Big Law Business)

• With global companies facing increasingly tougher data protection laws in Europe and elsewhere, DLA Piper has launched what it calls a data privacy scorebox for corporate privacy benchmarking. (Legaltech news)

• Cybersecurity as an area of law barely exists in India, but with possible new legal and reporting requirements in view, foreign firms could tap into an expectedexplosion in demand for legal expertise,although they are banned from practicing directly in the country. (Big Law Business/Bloomberg BNA)

• An upcoming conference at Vanderbilt Law School will look to dispel some “misguided” myths that artificial intelligence tools such as IBM’s Watson are going to put thousands of legal professionals out of work, a professor at the school told BLB. (Big Law Business)

• The criminal trial of two Uber executives in France got off to a lively start Thursday. (Wall Street Journal)

Legal Education

• An American Bar Association committee is due to consider a proposal that would toughen but also simplify bar-passage requirements of the law school accreditation standards. (ABA Journal)

• Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser on Friday will formally welcome students to the new $128 million campus of American University Washington College of Law. (National Law Journal)

• As the legal landscape is changing , so is law school. (Forbes)

• The Harvard Law Review Association had threatened to sue to block release of a New York University School of Law’s #BabyBlue project to offer a new open-access citation system based on Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation, but it has now been published. (Washington Post)

Miscellaneous

• A one-time Bryan Cave litigation associate laid off in 2008 after six months at the firm admitted in a federal court in St. Louis that he threatened to kill a partner at the firm in a 2013 telephone message. (American Lawyer)

• China is using covert, methodological means to gradually curtain the ability of human rights lawyers to advocate. (The Diplomat)