fraud

The City of London Police are embarking on a "radical" pilot project in which the details of fraud suspects will be shared with law firms so they can try to use the civil courts to seize the suspects' assets, The Guardian's Vikram Dodd reports.

Questions are being raised on whether the profit motive for the law firms could damage the fairness of the process. Questions are also being raised on the wisdom of transferring punishment from the state system to private law firms and to civil courts.

British law enforcement is turning to the law firms and civil courts because of the high volume of cybercrime.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has ruled that Chevron can sue law firm Patton Boggs "for fraud, malicious prosecution and making false statements to the New York court during the titanic legal battle between the U.S. oil giant and one of Washington’s most prestigious law and lobbying firms," The Washington Post reports.

Patton Boggs was hired by Ecuadorian villagers to come up with a strategy to enforce the $18 billion judgment won by plaintiff lawyer Steven Donziger against Chevron for polluting the country's rainforest, Reuters reports. (The award was reduced in 2013 to $9.5 billion.)

Last month, Kaplan ruled Donziger used bribery, fraud and extortion to win the multibillion-dollar judgment, Reuters further reports.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has ruled that Steven Donziger and his co-counsel obtaind a $9.5 billion environmental judgment in Ecuador against Chevron by "corrupt means," The Wall Street Journal reports. The judge ruled that, while Donziger started legal work in the case to improve conditions where his clients lived, his co-counsel and he "engaged in coercion, bribery, money laundering and other criminal conduct," including ghostwriting an expert report for a court-appointed expert, WSJ also reports.

In December, two Pittsburgh attorneys, as well as a doctor they hired to read X-rays, were found liable by a federal civil jury in West Virginia for violating the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and for state-law fraud over 11 fraudulent asbestos claims by railroad employees against CSX Transportation, I reported for The Legal Intelligencer in a story picked up by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Now the presiding judge has tripled the award of  $429,240.47, which was the amount CSX said it spent to defend 11 claims it said exemplified a wider practice, the West Virginia Record reports. Awards under RICO can be tripled, the West Virginia Record also reported.

My full coverage from December is here: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/business/legal/two-pittsburgh-asbest...

http://www.law.com/jsp/pa/PubArticlePA.jsp?id=1202582429830&slreturn=201...

A judge today rejected a putative class action in which readers of Lance Armstrong's books alleged they were subjected to fraud and false advertising in "inspirational true accounts" that "should have been labeled fiction" due to Armstrong's use of performance-enhancing drugs. Instead, the books were protected as free speech.