International Law

Is Your Offsite Data Safe? Microsoft GC Pushes New Security Law

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith is proposing a new law to help protect the privacy of digital data stored on remote servers rather than desktop computers. In a speech to the Brookings Institution, Smith unveiled Microsoft’s proposal for a Cloud Computing Advancement Act that addresses the issues of privacy, security…

Jan 22, 2010 7:55 PM CST

Chinese Official Says Missing Human Rights Lawyer Is ‘Where He Should Be’

A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry says a missing human rights lawyer “is where he should be” following a judicial proceeding. The missing lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, has taken on cases advocating reform and involving the banned Falun Gong spiritual group, the Associated Press reports. A memoir describes his past torture…

Jan 22, 2010 3:56 PM CST

BigLaw Firm Unveils Flexible Partnership Track Intended to Appeal to Women Lawyers

Seeking to turn the tide on a wave of departing women lawyers, a London-based BigLaw firm today unveiled a new flexible partnership track. It will allow attorneys at Allen & Overy to opt either to work a four-day week or take an extra 52 days of leave annually, yet remain…

Jan 22, 2010 1:13 AM CST

US-Educated Human Rights Lawyer Among 4 Convicted in Vietnam

An American-educated human rights lawyer was among four dissidents sentenced in Vietnam yesterday after being tried for trying to overthrow the government. The lawyer, Le Cong Dinh, was sentenced to five years in prison after admitting he had joined a banned political party and had met with foreign groups, according…

Jan 21, 2010 12:30 PM CST

Lawmaker Rejects US Apology, Asks Why FBI Used His Photo for Bin Laden Wanted Poster

An initially incredulous and now outraged Spanish lawmaker has rejected a United States apology and is demanding an investigation of the FBI’s admitted use of his digitally altered photographic image from a 2004 election photograph. It was the basis for a wanted poster of Osama bin Laden that was displayed…

Jan 20, 2010 1:51 AM CST

Execs & Gen’l Counsel Among 22 Nabbed in 1st FBI Foreign Bribes Sting

In what one observer described as a case of “compliance roulette” marking an apparent new era of federal enforcement concerning illegal foreign bribes, 22 people—including corporate executives and at least one general counsel—have been arrested in what is reportedly the first FBI undercover sting operation concerning the Foreign Corrupt Practices…

Jan 19, 2010 11:57 PM CST

Haiti Quake Shakes Up Adoptions

After 38 months, the paperwork was finally complete Monday on an Arizona couple’s planned adoption of a 7-year-old boy from Haiti. But Tuesday the courthouse crumbled in the country’s massive earthquake. The adoption decree is somewhere in the rubble. And, worse, Heather and Jason Goracke weren’t even sure that their…

Jan 16, 2010 1:42 AM CST

Canadian Lawyer Survives Haiti Quake; House Felt As If ‘All Made of Rubber’

A Canadian lawyer who arrived in Haiti on Tuesday for a business meeting survived the devastating earthquake there later that day and has returned safely home to Ottawa. Stephane Monpremier was in a meeting in a home in a gated community when the disaster struck, shaking the house as if…

Jan 15, 2010 11:47 PM CST

Lawyers Among Those Missing and Feared Dead in Haiti

Marie Aline Sillice had just spoken with her father a few hours earlier. But now she can’t reach him in Haiti, after the nation’s disastrous earthquake, and worries that 57-year-old Frangel Victor Sillice, a lawyer in the Port-au-Prince epicenter, may not have the diabetes medication he needs if he survived,…

Jan 14, 2010 11:16 PM CST

ABA Prez Calls for Haiti Donations After ‘Heartbreaking’ Quake; BigLaw Gives Big Money

After a disastrous earthquake in Haiti earlier this week that is conservatively estimated to have killed 50,000 and devastated much of the country, American Bar Association President Carolyn B. Lamm is calling for members to support humanitarian relief efforts to help residents recover and rebuild. “On behalf of the American…

Jan 14, 2010 8:23 PM CST

US Deportations to Haiti Halted After Devastating Earthquake

Following an earthquake in Haiti that may have killed tens of thousands, deportations to the country have been halted, United States officials announced today. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said deportations had stopped “for the time being,” reports the New York Times. Some 30,000 Haitians in the U.S.…

Jan 14, 2010 2:26 AM CST

China Cyber-Attack May Have Targeted Law Firm & Other Companies, Too

A Los Angeles law firm representing a software maker in a federal-court piracy case against the Chinese government may have been targeted in an apparent China-based cyber-attack that led Google Inc. to threaten this week to suspend Internet service in the Asian country. Gipson Hoffman & Pancione says in a…

Jan 14, 2010 1:43 AM CST

US Helped Mexico Nab High-Profile Suspect in 100s of Grisly Drug Slayings

Cutting-edge electronic surveillance is being credited for the arrest of a second major drug figure in Mexico in less than a month, marking a potential new direction in a bloody drug war in which some 17,000 have been killed over the past three years, many of them police and innocent…

Jan 13, 2010 1:46 AM CST

New Milbank Partner Quits After Former Firm Alleges ‘Personal Misconduct’

Less than a week ago, a German lawyer’s leap from Hengeler Mueller to the local offices of Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy was being portrayed as a coup for his new United States-based law firm. Now, however, less than two weeks after he started work as a partner of the…

Jan 11, 2010 9:03 PM CST

In ‘Undieground’ Protest in London & Elsewhere, Participants Doff Pants

Some did it in protest of new airport security rules. Others did it just for fun. But in subways and other transit locations around the globe, participants took off their trousers yesterday in what has become an annual No Pants Day tradition to reveal a wide range of underwear styles…

Jan 11, 2010 7:08 PM CST