Fenwick hires Gibson Dunn to defend FTX work, Senate confirms judicial nominee after Harris breaks deadlock, ousted law dean gets tenure, and more ??
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Silicon Valley-founded Fenwick & West hired Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher as it faces scrutiny over its role advising now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, including from the company's indicted founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
The firm known for representing startups and technology clients, was a primary outside law firm advising FTX as it grew into one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges before?imploding?in a rapid collapse last November. The firm also counseled Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund Alameda Research, which is at the center of the criminal case against him.
Nancy Hart and Kevin Rosen, leaders in Gibson Dunn's prominent law firm defense practice, are representing Fenwick on issues related to FTX, including in the Bankman-Fried criminal case and a federal class action lawsuit, sources said.
Fenwick, one of at least four major law firms to advise FTX, is not the only firm to be targeted by Bankman-Fried. The one-time crypto billionaire has?publicly clashed?with New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell for its role steering the exchange into bankruptcy.
Vice President Kamala Harris broke a deadlock in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday confirming Natasha Merle, a civil rights lawyer, to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
The final vote was 50-49, but Harris was needed to break a 50-50 tie in an earlier procedural vote on the nomination.
Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, joined all Republicans in opposing Merle. The vote marked the fourth time in recent weeks that Manchin has opposed one of President Joe Biden’s judicial picks.
Merle, who works on litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is the 100th district court nominee selected by Biden to secure Senate confirmation and is the latest in a string of civil rights lawyers to be confirmed to the federal bench this month.
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Joan Bullock, the former dean of Texas Southern University’s law school, has settled her gender bias lawsuit with its board of regents, in a deal that gives her tenure following her ouster last year.
A federal judge in Houston on Thursday dismissed her lawsuit following the settlement agreement. Bullock, who served as dean of Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law from 2019 to 2022,?claimed?that she was ousted without cause from the deanship and stripped of tenured faculty position, even though male deans in the past were allowed to remain on the faculty after their deanships ended. The university had argued she?was never granted?tenure.
Bullock said in her lawsuit that she brought stability to the law school, which previously had been found to be out of compliance with several American Bar Association accreditation standards including one requiring schools to maintain “sound admissions policies.” The school was also embroiled in an admissions scandal involving allegations of bribery, which resulted in a former admissions dean being charged with theft.
Sherrilyn Ifill, a prominent civil rights attorney and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is joining the faculty of Howard University School of Law to start a law and democracy program, the university said on Wednesday.
Ifill will launch a new center focused on the 14th amendment, which guarantees “equal protection under the law,” and will teach a seminar on the subject at Howard after she spends the fall semester as a distinguished professor of practice at Harvard Law School.
She will be Howard Law’s inaugural Vernon Jordan Endowed Chair in Civil Rights, named for the civil rights activist and lawyer who died in 2021 at age 85. Jordan graduated from Howard Law in 1960 before spending nearly four decades as a lawyer and lobbyist at law firm Akin Gump and counseling multiple presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Ifill?stepped down?from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 2022 after leading the organization for nine years. Prior to that, she was on the faculty of the University of Maryland Francis Kind Carey School of Law in Baltimore for two decades.
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