Wake Up Call: Ex-Dickstein Shapiro Partner Mulls Action Over Lost Stake

• As Dickstein Shapiro ends, one former equity partner considers taking action over his “substantial” lost stake.(Washington Post)

• A class-action against Walmart Stores , the biggest private employer in the U.S., will test a legal theory that anti-gay discrimination is a form of sex discrimination. (Bloomberg News)

• In a Feb. 16 ruling, an English High Court judge gave a green light for parties to use predictive coding in the case marking the first use of technology assisted review in UK courts. (Legaltech news)

• In an interview, veteran Altman Weil Inc. consultant James Cotterman talked about shrinking demand at large firms, the impact of baby boomer partner retirements on firms’ finances,and the growing effect of the non-equity partner tier on associate opportunities for advancement. (American Lawyer)

Legal Market

• DLA Piper leaders Roger Meltzer and Jay Rains, answer BLB questions about their re-election last week to four-year terms as the firm’s U.S. co-chairmen, the firm’s strategy, and recent partner exits from the firm. (Big Law Business)

• U.S. legal regulators could learn something from recent UK legislative and regulatory efforts to inject competition into the legal market , writes a legal consultant. (Big Law Business)

• Sidley Austin profits per partner expanded 3.8 percent in 2015 to top $2 million for the first time, early numbers show. (American Lawyer)

• After Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia graduated from Harvard Law School in 1960, he eventually moved to Cleveland where he spent six years toiling away as an associate at Jones Day. (Big Law Business)

• Reflecting on Scalia’s’s recent death, Carter Phillips, a lawyer whose 200-plus appellate arguments include dozens before the Supreme Court, said the absence of Scalia’s prominent role in oral argument will be a big loss for the court. (Big Law Business)

• With Senate Republicans divided on how to deal with an appointment to replace Scalia by President Obama, White House officials suggest a recess appointment is possible . (Washington Post)

Laterals and Moves

• President Barack Obama has appointed as head of his new cybersecurity commission a former national security adviser Tom Donilon, who is vice chairman of O’Melveny & Myers. (Big Law Business)

• West Coast tax attorney Marty Dakessian has left Reed Smith to launch a three-attorney boutique,called Dakessian Law, with headquarters in Los Angeles and a satellite office in Sacramento. (Big Law Business)

• Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft is losing its chief information officer, Tom Baldwin, who is due to join legal consultancy Fireman & Company next month as a partner, with the task of helping law firms increase their profitability in today’s environment of flat demand, increased competition and billing pressure. (Big Law Business)

• As Milwaukee-based law firm Gonzalez Saggio & Harlan prepares to close at the end of this month, some New York and New Jersey-based attorneys at the firm, whose lawyer headcount at one time numbered up to 130 over 18 cities, vowed to move together to another firm. (New York Law Journal)

• K&L Gates has promoted 50 attorneys to partner worldwide, of which most were in the United States, with overall promotions including 27 women. (The Lawyer)

Technology

• Confronting U.S. investigators who are invoking a 200-year-old law to demand help to gain access to a terrorist’s iPhone ,Apple is arguing that it can’t be compelled to create a key to the encryption of its devices. (Big Law Business/Bloomberg News)

• The balance of leverage between the technology industry and U.S. authorities has been shifting slowly since the Snowden revelations, but tech companies hold all the cards and look likely to win in the end, says an observer. (New York Times)

• As a way to cast itself as a protector of privacy, it makes good business sense for Apple Inc. to stand up to the U.S. authorities. (Wired)

• Columbia University computer scientist Steve Bellovin has been appointed as the first technology expert on an important oversight board that advises President Obama on privacy and civil liberties implications of surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency. (Wired)

• Legal industry and other businesses are building and deploying their own applications at a record pace, driven by security concerns regarding public apps and a desire to tap their own IT capabilities to improve internal processes, according to a new survey. (Legaltech news)

• Wombat Security Technologies released PhishAlarm Analyzer, an email solution that uses machine learning to recognize phishing attacks . (Legaltech news)

• A Los Angeles hospital paid a $17,000 bitcoin ransom to hackers who broke into its electronic medical records system. (Washington Post)

• With tax-filing season about to start, lawmakers expressed concern that the Internal Revenue Service has not fixed cyber vulnerabilities in its system and the problem is actually getting worse. (Politico)

• Major tech companies from Facebook Inc. to Google Inc. rallied behind Apple Inc. , which is resisting U.S. efforts to force it to help authorities unlock a terrorist’s iPhone. (Bloomberg News)

Legal Education

• Justice Antonin Scalia’s observation that the current Supreme Court is composed entirely of people who had studied at Harvard and Yale law schools pointed up a broader problem of oligarchy and “ narrow credentialism ” in hiring at American institutions such as investment banks, law firms and consulting firms, says a writer. (Bloomberg View)

• A Harvard Law School student group said this week said that its pro-Palestinian positions had spurred Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy to rescind its annual funding for student-run activitiesat the school, but the school said the law firm has only changed how the funds will be administered. (American Lawyer)

• Strategies for benefiting from a visit to a law school at different stages of an application: when considering whether to apply; trying to get off of the waiting list; or when already admitted. (U.S. News & World Report)

Miscellaneous

• When he died, Justice Antonin Scalia had apparently not specified where he wanted his official papers to go. (National Law Journal)