Wake Up Call: Lawyer ‘Screw Up’ Opens Up Fox to Privilege Issues

Welcome to Bloomberg Law’s Wake Up Call, a daily rundown of the top news for lawyers, law firms, and in-house counsel.

• Fox Corp. could have an unexpected vulnerability as it faces defamation litigation filed by voting equipment companies Smartmatic and Dominion over its coverage of the 2020 election. A report says Fox’s big earning top lawyer Viet Dinh didn’t get a license to practice law in California until June this year, and that could make potentially “sensitive” conversations he may have had with top Fox executives discoverable in the litigation. (Semafor)
• Cravath, Swaine & Moore appears to be backing off the flexible office policy it announced back in August 2021 when it told attorneys they could work remote about six days per month without specifying which days. A firmwide email in September stipulated that “Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be designated in-office workdays where everyone across the firm is expected to be working from the office.” That policy puts Cravath closer to the mandatory three-days-a-week in office policy that Ropes & Gray announced in September, Above The Law said. (Above The Law)
• Rap star Kanye West, who recently changed his name to Ye, has reportedly already fired Brown Rudnick as his law firm after its star attorney Camille Vasquez refused to work for him because he won’t back down from his anti-semitic comments. (New York Post) The rapper’s rants have cost him several major contracts, and his divorce attorneys have also dropped him, another report says. (Page Six)

Lawyers, Law Firms

• Columbia Law School said it will use a $17.5 million gift received from a 2000 alum of the school, the largest single commitment in its history, to help support the design and construction of a renovation of its law library. (Law.Columbia.edu)
• Veteran New York federal prosecutors Elizabeth Geddes and Nadia Shihata, who worked on the sex-trafficking conviction of singer R. Kelly, started a law firm focused on civil rights and sexual misconduct matters. (Reuters)
• Most UK intellectual property attorneys, paralegals, and business support staff reported feeling increased stress and anxiety because of their workloads and deadline pressure since the pandemic, while 40% said they’ve considered getting out of the profession, according to a new survey. (World Trademark Review)

Laterals, Moves, In-house

• Goodwin grabbed Cravath M&A lawyer Kirkie Maswoswe as a partner in New York in its mergers & acquisitions practice and technology group. (GoodwinLaw.com)
• Proskauer Rose picked up former Bank of America vice president and attorney Jonathan DeSantis as a partner in its capital markets and leveraged finance groups in New York. He comes over after close to 11 years as a partner at Shearman & Sterling. (Proskauer.com)
• Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney brought in veteran commercial real estate attorney Bonnie S. Milavec as a shareholder in Philadelphia. Among her previous roles, she was a senior counsel and executive at real estate investment trust Liberty Property Trust, which was bought by another REIT, Prologis, Inc., in 2019. (BIPC.com)
• Linklaters named its France real estate practice head, Francoise Maigrot, to be its new Paris managing partner. (Le Monde du Droit)
• Cannabis company Glass House Brands Inc. hired former Skadden Arps corporate lawyer Benjamin Vega as general counsel and corporate secretary. Vega arrives from animal health company Covetrus, Inc., where he was deputy GC. He was previously GC at investment firm Manhattan West. (PR Newswire)
• Ropes & Gray announced it named 21 lawyers to partner of which close to half are women and most are based in New York. (RopesGray.com)

Legal Education

• Alabama-based Samford University, a private Christian institution, refused to allow a group of students at its Cumberland School of Law to form a local campus chapter of OUTLaw, a student organization dedicated to LGBTQ students. (Baptist News)