Wake Up Call: Lawyer Fired After Subpoena in Welfare Fraud Case

In today’s column, Gordon & Rees said founding partner Donald W. Rees died last week; law firms are increasingly suing former clients over unpaid fees; and an Indiana Twitter user said his fingerprints almost kept him from taking the bar exam.

• Leading off, a Mississippi state agency fired a lawyer, a former U.S. attorney investigating a welfare fraud scandal, after he issued a subpoena seeking details about the involvement of prominent individuals from the state—including a former governor and retired pro football star Brett Favre. (New York Times)
• Law firms are increasingly suing former clients to recover unpaid legal fees. The amount of money at stake in the suits is also rising. (American Lawyer)
• Gordon & Rees said a founding partner of the firm, Donald W. Rees, who represented insurers and reinsurers in the US, died July 17 “after a full and remarkable life.” (GRSM.com)

Lawyers, Law Firms

• Students suing major US universities over financial aid benefits got a boost from the Biden administration. The Justice Department endorsed the students’ central claim that the universities were allegedly colluding on setting financial aid awards. (Times Higher Education)
• Deal update: Crowell & Moring said it is advising Amazon.com Inc. on health care and related matters in its acquisition of One Medical for approximately $3.9 billion. The Crowell team is led by senior counsel Janet Walker and partner Renée Delphin-Rodriguez. (Crowell.com) Paul, Weiss is counseling Amazon on the deal, while Cooley and Ropes & Gray are representing San Francisco-based 1Life Healthcare Inc., parent of primary care company One Medical. (BLAW)
• Fenwick & West is the biggest intellectual property firm in Silicon Valley with 66 local attorneys. Latham & Watkins, with 64, and Morrison & Foerster, with 46, make up the rest of the top three in a recent ranking. (Silicon Valley Business Journal) Wiggin and Dana said it donated $1 million in pro bono legal services to minority-owned businesses across the country for the second straight year. (Wiggin.com)
• The head of UK elite firm Slaughter and May’s competition practice in China was fined 3,500 Hong Kong dollars ($456) for careless driving that caused the 2021 death of a pedestrian in Hong Kong. (RollonFriday) A Pittsburgh defendant punched his own lawyer then got convicted on drug and gun charges. (Post Gazette)

Laterals, Moves, In-house

• Kirkland & Ellis hired intellectual property litigator Nadia Haghighatian as a partner in Austin, Texas. She arrives from Holland & Knight; Michael Best added corporate and securities attorney Christopher Seamster as partner in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He arrives from Blanco Tackabery; Kutak Rock recruited former US Environmental Protection Agency deputy general counsel Ken von Schaumburg as of counsel in Washington in its corporate and government services group. He arrives recently from Clark Hill, where he was chair of the environment, energy and natural resources group; Offit Kurman announced that New Jersey-based principal Tanya Freeman and Desiree Gareau, Philadelphia-based eKnowledge and innovation manager, will be co-leaders of the Maryland-based firm’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee; Freeborn & Peters added three lawyers in Chicago, getting corporate attorney Clayton Lynn and litigators William J. Sullivan and Nicholas Vittori as associates. (Freeborn.com)
• The Texas attorney general hired former Norton Rose Fulbright partner Darrin Forrest Brumbaugh as deputy attorney general for legal counsel. (TexasAttorneyGeneral.gov) King & Spalding named corporate and finance and investments partner Andrew Brereton the new managing partner of its Singapore office; Big Anglo-Australian firm Herbert Smith Freehills named banking and finance partner Régis Oréal managing partner of its Paris office. (Le Monde du Droit)

Legal Education

• Twitter user Nathan Blake got close to 100,000 likes for tweet that he was prevented from taking the Universal Bar Exam in Indiana because his fingerprints were rejected for “insufficient ridges.” Blake later tweeted with an update that he’d been granted permission to sit for the exam. (Law.com)