Welcome to your Tuesday morning round-up of stories in today’s edition of The Legal Intelligencer, which also includes this week’s edition of Pennsylvania Law Weekly. All of the links below will take you directly to today’s stories, or you can head straight over to The Legal’s homepage. (Some stories may require registration or a paid subscription.)
Today’s paper also features this year’s First-Year Associates supplement, including articles about office etiquette for new associates, the need for formal mentoring and results from a survey conducted by The Legal.
The top story in today’s Legal is the fourth in reporter Amaris Elliott-Engel’s products liability series. In the latest article, she writes that federal pre-emption and direct-to-consumer marketing are the next frontier in pharmaceutical law. Products liability attorneys are continuing to struggle with what state-law pharmaceutical and medical device claims are likely to survive federal pre-emption.
Also above the fold on Page 1, Amaris Elliott-Engel writes that a diet drug claim involving delayed injury has survived. A federal judge has said it is up to a jury to decide whether diet drugs caused a South Carolina woman’s likely fatal pulmonary hypertension to surface 11 years after she stopped taking the drugs.
Below the fold on Page 1, reporters Zack Needles and Gina Passarella write that firms are having a tough time searching for junior transactional lawyers, a group that was affected by the economy’s nosedive in 2008, when large firms shifted young associates away from sluggish transactional practices.
In more Regional News on Page 3, reporter Saranac Hale Spencer writes that the reorganized successor to the former Penn Central Transportation Co. must pay a $15 million judgment against the original railroad company, which filed for bankruptcy in 1970.
As always, our People in the News section is on Page 2, and the top stories from our sibling publications across the country make up the Page 4 National News section.
In an Antitrust Law column on Page 5, Carl W. Hittinger and John D. Huh write that the FTC is recalibrating its sights on the disgorgement of profits.
In a Business of Law column on Page 7, Frank Michael D’Amore writes about law firm economics and what clients really want.
Today’s lead story in PLW is the Judicial Conduct Board issuing significantly more letters of caution in 2011 than the previous year. As reporter Ben Present writes, the JCB issued 35 such letters, which it intended to be a “wake-up call.”
Below the fold on Page 1, Gina Passarella writes that a car’s black box can’t be suppressed in an accident trial, as a Lehigh County judge has ruled. The defendant in the case argued there was no probable cause in the investigating officer’s affidavit for the issuance of a warrant, and therefore wanted the data recorder suppressed.
On Page 3, Zack Needles writes that the state Supreme Court has ruled that decisions of the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records may be subject to challenges over whether records are disclosable under the Right-to-Know Law.
There’s much more inside this week’s PLW, including Samuel C. Stretton’s Ethics Forum, in which he writes about lawyers making clear what information is privileged; Leonard Deutchman’s Cyberlaw column on cost-shifting in e-discovery; and Scott A. Coffina’s Constitutional Law column on the winding road of Pennsylvania’s voter ID litigation.
If you have questions or comments about any of today's stories, or our coverage as a whole, we invite you to e-mail any of the reporters directly. We hope you'll enjoy today's Legal.
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