Legal Pad

Harris Says Cooley Jump Onto the Bell Bandwagon is Hypocritical

[Kate Moser]

L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley’s ads say he’s been tough on corruption, flashing a photo of the former Bell city manager in his jail jumpsuit. 

But his opponent in the race for attorney general, S.F. DA Kamala Harris, has accused Cooley of jumping on that takedown of the corrupt Bell officials because it was popular in an election year.

Today her campaign pressed that accusation, citing a Los Angeles Times story about retired Bell police Sergeant James Corcoran, who says he personally took concerns over city officials’ misconduct to the DA’s office a year and a half ago, and Cooley’s office did nothing.

On a press call organized by Harris’s campaign today, Corcoran said he’s a lifelong Republican and “conservative by nature,” but that he had to “set the record straight.”

New U.S. Attorney Set to Defend the Elderly Against Abuse

[Ginny LaRoe]

Melinda Haag is going after nursing homes.

The Northern District’s new U.S. attorney today announced that her office is reviewing results of a private consultant’s inquiry into nursing home complaints .

The office will “prosecute, to the fullest extent of the law, those individuals who are in violation of federal statutes,” Haag said in a prepared statement.

The announcement is one of the first indications of where the new top prosecutor plans to focus her resources.

The Hate Mail Pastime of One DMV Employee

[Kate Moser]

As if waiting in line at the DMV weren’t miserable enough.

The Transgender Law Center is investigating a report that a San Francisco Department of Motor Vehicles employee sent a hateful letter to the home of a transgender woman whose paperwork she processed.

The woman, Amber Yust, had gone to the San Francisco DMV office last week to change her name on her driver’s license.

Google Dodges FTC's Privacy Inquiry With New Exec and Policies

[Amy Miller]

Google’s legal department got some good news Wednesday. The Federal Trade Commission notified the company that it was calling off its inquiry into the search engine’s collection of consumer data transmitted over wireless networks by its Street View cars.

The news was announced in a letter to outside counsel Albert Gidari, a partner at Perkins Coie in Seattle, from David Vladek, director of the bureau of consumer protection. In it, Vladek said Google had responded to concerns that it had collected unencrypted “payload data” by appointing a director of privacy for engineering and product management, providing additional staff training on privacy issues, and incorporating a formal privacy review process for new initiatives.

“We ask that the company continue its dialogue with the FTC about how best to protect consumer privacy as it develops its products and services,” Vladeck said in conclusion.

Last week, Google announced on its website that it was creating stronger privacy controls. “We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users,” said Alan Eustace, senior vice president for engineering and research.

Harris Camp Wants to Can Attack Ad Funded by Chamber of Commerce, Philip Morris

[Kate Moser]

Kamala Harris’s campaign is complaining to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission today about an attack ad that started airing over the weekend. 

The ad slams Harris for her personal opposition to the death penalty and her decision not to seek death for the killer of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004. It features Espinoza’s mother.

Jim Sutton, Harris’s campaign counsel, said on a press call this morning that the ad needs to be investigated because it doesn’t disclose who funds it. The ad says it’s paid for by a Virginia-based group called Republican State Leadership Committee, but Sutton criticized the group for failing to disclose that the more than $1 million it’s dropping on the ad campaign comes from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Philip Morris.

Reed Smith Litigator Summits Kilimanjaro, But Not Without Some Breathlessness

[Petra Pasternak]

For Jack Nelson, the term “uphill battle” holds fresh meaning, and it has nothing to do with a tough case or managing a big firm office.

The vice chairman of Reed Smith’s litigation department just got back from a 10-day trek to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The steepest part took almost six days, Nelson said. And that required a slow-paced determination. He and another 12 Reed Smith attorneys and staff, mostly from the firm’s London office, hiked about five hours each morning, paused to set up camp and eat lunch, then hiked another hour and a half just to sit, enjoy the view and get used to the elevation before returning to camp for the night. “The trek leader called it ‘climb high, sleep low,’” Nelson said. It was exhilarating to reach the summit 19,341 feet above sea level, he said, and he doesn’t plan on doing it ever again.

Ulmer's Got the Cash, Nava's Got the Chinese Surname

[Kate Moser]

Incumbent San Francisco Judge Richard Ulmer is still adding heft to his campaign war chest in the home stretch of the judicial race.

According to documents filed this week, Ulmer raised $38,000 between Oct. 1 and Oct. 16.

His opponent, Michael Nava, raised a little more than $5,000 in the same period. Nava’s husband also loaned the campaign $50,000 earlier this month. Since the start of the year, Ulmer’s funds have topped $300,000, if you include a $50,000 loan he made to his campaign last winter. Many of his $1,000 gifts in October have come from San Francisco law firms and lawyers, including trial attorney Thomas Brandi, the Law Offices of Nevin & Absalom, the Law Offices of Cesari, Werner & Moriarty, and Abramson, Smith, Waldsmith (partner Albert Abramson also separately gave Ulmer $1,000).

Prosecutors Want to Ditch Remainder of Economic Espionage Case

[Ginny LaRoe]

Looks like the U.S. attorney’s office wasn’t willing to risk another loss in a novel economic espionage case that ended badly for prosecutors last year.

The office today moved to dismiss the remaining charge against two Silicon Valley engineers, Lan Lee and Yuefei Ge, who were accused of stealing trade secrets from their employer, NetLogic Microsystems, and trying to commercialize them with venture funding from the Chinese government.

After a three-week trial last November, a jury acquitted the pair on two counts and deadlocked on three others, prompting U.S. District Judge James Ware of San Jose to later junk two of the three lingering counts. Ware kept in play one trade secret count, on which jurors had divided 6-6. With Ware’s approval, that count will now be history too.

Ge’s attorney, Edward Swanson of San Francisco’s Swanson & McNamara, said: “This is the right result, and we appreciate the prosecutor being willing to take another look at the case.”

Of course, there’s a new U.S. attorney in charge now.

Facebook's Week Sees Class Action and a Pornographic Imitator

[Amy Miller]

It’s been a busy week for lawyers representing Facebook, and the week isn’t over yet.

On Tuesday, Connecticut resident Shelley Albini and others filed a class action against Facebook and the game developer Zynga Game Network, Inc. alleging privacy violations. The suit comes on the heels of a Wall Street Journal investigation into the sharing of users’ personal information by Facebook and Zynga. A suit against Facebook filed in federal court in Rhode Island in June over an earlier privacy breach was amended Monday to include the latest incident reported in the Wall Street Journal.

And there’s one friend request Facebook members won’t be accepting, if the company gets its way. The social networking site is suing the website Faceporn.com and its founder, Thomas Pederson, for trademark infringement.

Suicides Anchor Latest Prop 8 Brief

[Ginny LaRoe]

After quotations from the likes of Lawrence, Romer and Loving, and after the dozens of pages of legal arguments on strict scrutiny, rational basis review, standing and the rest, gay marriage supporters offer some heart-wrenching current events in their latest filing in the case against Prop 8.

“Last month, in a widely publicized tragedy, a young Rutgers student jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after being outed on the Internet as gay,” reads the brief filed late Monday to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “A few days later, across the Hudson River in the Bronx, two 17-year-old young men were beaten and tortured to the brink of death by a gang of nine because they were suspected of being gay.”

It continues: “Incidents such as these are all too familiar to our society. And it is too plain for argument that discrimination written into our constitutional charters inexorably leads to shame, humiliation, ostracism, fear, and hostility. The consequences are all too often very, very tragic.”

The brief is in Perry v. Schwarzenegger.