• On April 11, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts will have his first chance to publicly address the political impasse over Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court and its effect on the court at the 2016 Federal Circuit Conference, but he is not likely to wade into the controversy. (National Law Journal)
• A federal judge in New Jersey rejected a motion to let New York law firm Cahill, Gordon & Reindel and two of its attorneys off the hook in a class-action suit that alleges they conspired with a client to conceal and purge evidence in thousands of asbestos injury cases. (New Jersey Law Journal)
• Pepper Hamilton said it has appointed health effects litigation partner Nina Gussack to the new position of chief client ambassador, initially to meet with clients in the life sciences sector to learn their legal and business challenges, and eventually taking the effort “firm-wide.” (Big Law Business)
• Lawyers for Dennis Hastert, the former U.S. House Speaker and Illinois Republican, told a federal judge Hastert has medical problems and asked that he be sentenced to probation for federal banking law violations he pleaded guilty to last year. (Washington Post)
Legal Market
• First-quarter law firm merger activity was up from last year, in a quarter that also saw two large groups of laterals join other firms in combinations that were not officially mergers, according to research by Fairfax Associates. (Big Law Business)
• Houston-based Baker Botts can’t be held liable for representing two competitors seeking patents based on the same technology, because the complaining client didn’t prove the firm had a conflict that caused the alleged $40 million in damages, a Texas federal court ruled in March in a rare case. (Big Law Business/Bloomberg BNA)
• Net profits at Barnes & Thornburg surged 8.1 percent in 2015, as the Indianapolis-based firm expanded in Dallas and Atlanta, giving it 13 offices. (American Lawyer)
• America’s white-collar professions, especially its least diverse–the legal profession–could learn from the progress that college basketball has made on improving diversity since the segregated 1960s, writes the chief diversity and inclusion officer at a major law firm. (Big Law Business)
• The Panama Papers leak has put secretive law firm Mossack Fonseca and its two founding partners under an international spotlight they did not seek. (New York Times)
• Mayer Brown’s construction department in London is trying out so-called agile working, which, among other things, aims to give people more flexibility and autonomy in how they complete assigned tasks. Several UK firms are already using agile working in London, but not many U.S. firms have tried it to date. (The Lawyer)
• A ruling last summer by the Federal Communications Commission that banned “unwanted” phone calls to cell phones has also made Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies vulnerable to costly class-action law suits. (The Recorder)
SCOTUS
• The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was known to have “hated” acronyms. What would he have thought of the unfortunate monikers that George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law has been saddled with on the internet? (National Law Journal)
Laterals and Moves
• Bart Williams, a top Munger Tolles & Olson partner who spent 21 years at the firm he co-managed from 2005 to 2007, has left to take a leadership role at Proskauer Rose. (Big Law Business)
• Five facts about Bob Bailey chief legal officer of Allergan, and Doug Lankler, general counsel of Pfizer, who remain in those roles following the demise Wednesday of the $160 billion tax-motivated merger between the two pharmaceutical giants. (Big Law Business)
• In the latest of a series of recent significant departures for Bracewell, the firm has lost Houston private equity partner Scott Miller to Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and New York tax partner Abraham “Avi” Reshtick, who moved to Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo. (American Lawyer)
• Scott Barshay, the top M&A partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore who recently moved Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, has a brother who is a corporate partner at the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris Shriver & Jacobson. (Big Law Business)
Technology
• Most corporations turn to outside counsel for privacy and data security matters and they often find such counsel through referrals and personal relationships, according to a recent Bloomberg Law/International Association of Privacy Professionals survey of 373 corporate privacy professionals. (Big Law Business/Bloomberg BNA)
• The borderless environment enabled by cloud technology has created new cyber-threats from third-party apps, “brute force” password attacks, and login attempts with stolen credentials, writes an observer. (Information Week)
• The massive Panama Papers breach, purportedly the largest such hack in history, was illegal but tax authorities worldwide welcomed it as a win against tax cheats. Experts said it illustrates law firms’ vulnerability to so-called ethical hacking. (Legaltech news)
• In the past week, Facebook’s standalone messaging company WhatsApp released an update aimed at protecting the privacy of potentially billions of users while the world learned that Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca had suffered a breach exposing many of its clients’ tax avoidance schemes to international scrutiny. (Financial Times)
• Opposing the Panama Free Trade Agreement in 2011, Bernie Sanders, now a Democratic presidential candidate, told the Senate that Panama was “a world leader” in helping big corporations and wealthy Americans evade U.S. taxes. (Wired)
Legal Education
• Cornell Law School plans to offer its first LLM class in law, technology and entrepreneurship at its tech campus in New York city starting in September, and three law firms already to see resumes of students taking the class, the school said. (Legaltech news)
Miscellaneous
• Mississippi’s new law allowing business owners to refuse service to LGBT people based on religious belief is as unconstitutional as a hypothetical law allowing businesses to refuse service to African-Americans would be, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of University of California, Irvine School of Law said.