Judicial Notice (07.23.22): Hot Hot Hot

A nine-figure appellate win, Biglaw office openings in NYC and H-Town, and other legal news from the week that was.

Puerto Rico’s financial crisis has given rise to noteworthy litigation (photo by Natanael Ginting via Getty Images).

Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking on the button below. Thanks!

What did we do before air conditioning? It made sense to me when the designers of the video game Civilization finally added “Refrigeration” to the list of civilization advances, in Civilization IV. Today’s Judicial Notice is brought to you by… central air.

Susan Miller of Astrology Zone predicted that July would be “a strong, productive month” for me, and that was true this week:

• I spoke to journalists: I talked to Adam Liptak of the New York Times about what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson can expect as she starts at the Supreme Court, Avalon Zoppo of the National Law Journal about the growing trend of “self-concurrences,” and Katie Lee Barlow of FOX 5 DC about Twitter v. Musk.

• I got tons of administrivia done: completing school forms for our son Harlan, dealing with the many service providers it takes to maintain a suburban home, and hitting the car wash.

• I whittled down my email backlog from 2,000 to under 1,000 (because 1,000 emails is the new “inbox zero”—for me, at least).

• I ate very expensive strawberries.

And I stayed on top of the news, to which we now turn.

Lawyers of the Week: Joshua Rosenkranz, Robert Loeb, and Naomi Scotten.

Congratulations to Josh Rosenkranz, Bob Loeb, and Naomi Scotten. The three Orrick partners notched a major victory before New York’s Appellate Division, First Department. The court reversed a $120 million judgment against Orrick’s client, Johnson & Johnson (“J&J”), in a case brought on behalf of a Brooklyn woman who claimed J&J’s baby powder caused her cancer.

Thousands of these “talc cases” have been filed across the country, and this was the first to go to trial in New York. As Naomi Scotten told Ross Todd of the American Lawyer, who recognized Scotten and her partners as his Litigators of the Week, “What was at stake was and is massive. Without an appellate reversal, this enormous judgment would have established a playbook for the plaintiffs’ bar in New York and nationally. A full reversal, holding that there was inadequate proof of causation, profoundly changes that dynamic.”

This ruling, plus a similar reversal of a $117 million verdict that Orrick won last year in New Jersey, will have significant implications for the bankruptcy of LTL Management LLC, the subsidiary with J&J’s talc liabilities—or at least the liabilities remaining after the company paid out $3.5 billion in settlements and verdicts. No matter which side you take in the talc litigation, this latest win is undoubtedly important—which makes the Orrick trio my Lawyers of the Week.

Other lawyers in the news:

• Retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz gave an interview to the New Yorker about how he’s now persona non grata on Martha’s Vineyard, building on complaints he made back in 2018 to the New York Times (for which he got additional criticism).

• Perkins Coie counsel Sopen Shah, nominated to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, could have a tough time getting confirmed. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is displeased by deleted tweets from Shah declaring that Johnson “does not know how law works” and hoping that Wisconsin voters would teach Johnson “a thing or two about accountability come 2022.” Wisconsin (Not So) Nice?

• California personal injury lawyer Timothy Allen Scott could face discipline after telling his female opposing counsel in open court, “I'll see you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday.” (Click on the preceding link if you don’t get why that’s offensive; I had to spell it out for my husband Zach.)

Legal Assistant of the Week: Hannah Kim, formerly of White & Case and now at Cravath Swaine & Moore, has been sued by White & Case for allegedly defrauding the firm of more than $500,000 (even though she was already highly paid, earning almost $600,000 in three years). Kim, who’s suing the firm for pregnancy discrimination, denies the allegations and claims the lawsuit is retaliatory.

In memoriam:

• Gerald Shargel, the high-profile criminal defense lawyer who became famous for defending the infamous—including Mafia figures like John Gotti, Anthony Provenzano, Joseph Gambino, and Salvatore Gravano—passed away at 77.

• Donald Lubin, former chairman of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal (now part of Dentons), passed away at 88. (Lubin died in June; I came across the news while catching up on The Wall, a curated collection of obituaries that lawyer Charles McKenna publishes each month.)

May they rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, lower courts across the country have been inundated with abortion litigation. For example, this week state judges in Louisiana and Kentucky blocked their states’ abortion bans—for now. (To track the most notable rulings, read How Appealing or follow Howard Bashman on Twitter.)