Legal Pad

OMM and Paul, Hastings See Revenue Drops of Near 10%

[Cynthia Foster]

Am Law Daily has posted more 2009 financial information from California firms:

O'Melveny & Myers continues to have problems generating revenue and profits. Revenue declined almost 9% in 2009, and profits per partner were down just over 1%. Chairman Arthur Culvahouse, Jr. called 2009 "the most challenging year" that he could recall.

Paul, Hastings suffered a near-10% drop in revenue, after a mere 1% increase in 2008. Revenue per lawyer, however, actually jumped 1.4% due to cuts in associate ranks.

You can read more about the Am Law 100 results nationwide here.

O'Melveny Scores Pro Bono Win in Human Trafficking/Slavery Case

Paul McNamara, in the Los Angeles office of O’Melveny & Myers, secured a $768,000 judgment last week for an Indonesian domestic worker who was enslaved by a banker and his wife in their LaCanada home.

The verdict is one of the first civil judgments under the California Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which passed in 2005, according to McNamara and Kevin Kish, an attorney at Bet Tzedek, a public interest law firm that worked on the case with O’Melveny.

McNamara, who usually works on class actions and insurance defense, said he wasn't aware of the scale of human trafficking here before taking this case, which the firm handled pro bono.

“This really is not an isolated incident,” he said. “It’s widespread in Los Angeles and California.”

Bank executives as tight-fisted human traffickers, after the jump.

O'Melveny on SonicBlue Problem: Ain't Our Problem

We’re going broke on PACER this morning reading the hundreds of pages of briefs filed in advance of an Oct. 13 hearing on O’Melveny & Myers’ involvement in the six-year-old SonicBlue bankruptcy.

O’Melveny is under fire from creditors for not disclosing a waiver in a settlement between SonicBlue creditor VIA and Intel. The creditors committee alleges O’Melveny’s omissions amount to misconduct and want O’Melveny’s final fee request for $1.2 million rejected.

In a brief (.pdf) filed late Friday, O’Melveny lays out a defense that essentially says it wasn’t part of its job to investigate that part of the settlement. It touts its success at reducing VIA’s original $100 million claim down to $12.5 million, which involved extensive negotiations with Intel over patent licensing agreements.

"Guilt by frequency of association" and more, after the jump ...

Light Reading: Judge Turned Up Heat on O'Melveny

Legal Pad noted last week that U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Marilyn Morgan had ordered an evidentiary hearing to go over O’Melveny & Myers partner Suzzanne Uhland’s role in the 2006 Intel-VIA settlement in the SonicBlue bankruptcy.

We now have a copy of the hearing transcript, which you can view here.

You can see Judge Morgan was not exactly gentle when she questioned whether there was negligence or misconduct on O’Melveny’s part in the settlement, which benefited VIA over other unsecured creditors.

Confidential to OMM: Should've Let Sleepin' Dogs Lie

Now, we aren’t paid to give advice, so we don’t usually give it, but sometimes advice simply erupts forth from us.

Our two cents this week: If you have a can of worms that very important people are willing to overlook, don’t ask a court to approve $1.3 million for your stinky critters when you should be burying them where no one will ever find them again.

Judge Marilyn Morgan of the Northern District Bankruptcy Court wants to dissect a can of worms reopened by O’Melveny & Myers last month when it asked for the rest of its fees for its work in the SonicBlue bankruptcy case. (It was $750,000 until negotiations with the creditors got them to cut it down to $250,000.)

Morgan ordered an evidentiary hearing for October to go over partner Suzzane Uhland’s “conduct” in the case.

That can’t be good. Slackjawed creditors, after the jump.

Thelen Vet Takes Partners, Associates to OMM

Ken Nissly, a 30-year veteran of recently-collapsed Thelen, is making his new home at O’Melveny & Myers in Menlo Park

“It’s sad to see [Thelen] going away, but I’m thrilled for the opportunity to go to O’Melveny,” Nissly told Legal Pad today.

Nissly, a well-known IP litigator who does tons of work for Hynix, a huge South Korean memory chip company, will be joined at O’Melveny by two other Thelen partners, Susan Van Keulen and Geoffrey Yost, as well as four associates to be named later.

Career tracks and why Thelen failed, after the jump …

Roundup: O'Melveny Cuts, Heller Moves

There is so much going on with California-based firms, we’re barely keeping up with it all. Fortunately, we’ve got a lot of friends. Here are two bits of news from within our family of legal pubs, on the issue of rumored layoffs at O'Melveny, which is rumored to be having not the best time right now, and on a firm making its first overseas move thanks to some Heller partners in London: