A disbarred lawyer who police say scammed women in Illinois and eight other states out of more than $1 million pleaded not guilty today for allegedly cashing bogus checks here.

Hillard Jay Quint, 42, entered his plea when he appeared before Cook County Judge Diane Cannon in the Criminal Courts building. He is charged with identity theft and four counts of deceptive practice for allegedly cashing $16,000 in checks written on a closed bank account under the alias Matt Goldstein.

At the brief hearing, Quint, dressed in a tan jail outfit, told the judge he cannot afford an attorney. He is being held without bond pending trial.

Quint was arrested Feb. 23 at his Gold Coast apartment. While in Chicago, police say he represented himself as a wealthy CEO from California while dating women he met through online services.

Authorities allege Quint dated at least eight women in Chicago and scammed $24,000 from three of them.

Belmont Area detective Cindy Serafini said Wednesday the investigation into the alleged fraud was ongoing, and more charges were possible.

Quint is scheduled to appear in court for a status hearing on May 14.

Mr. Elias’s tax expertise advising clients in joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, project finance transactions, strategic investments and workouts, and real estate transactions will make him a valuable asset to both the corporate and real estate practices at the firm.

“We are delighted to have Pete with us. He will be a great addition to the team and will expand our tax capabilities on the West Coast, allowing us to better serve our corporate and real estate clients,” said Thomas Humphreys, chair of the Tax Department.  “Pete’s outstanding tax skills, particularly in the corporate area, will allow our office to be truly full-service for our corporate clients,” added Mark Zebrowski, managing partner of the firm’s San Diego office.

Mr. Elias said, “Morrison & Foerster provides me with a great platform to expand my practice.  The firm's deep commitment to client service will give me the opportunity to build on existing relationships and contribute to the continued growth of the firm’s tax practice.”

Mr. Elias joins the firm from Foley & Lardner.  Mr. Elias received his J.D. from the University of California, Hastings School of Law in 1992, and his LL.M. in taxation from the New York University School of Law in 1993. He graduated, magna cum laude, from the University of Pittsburgh.  He was admitted to the California State Bar in 1993.

www.mofo.com

Speaking about the lawsuits, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson stated that:

I am deeply disturbed by the allegation that a major franchisee of the nation's second-largest tax preparation firm is intentionally preparing improper tax returns with inflated refunds. I'm particularly concerned that many taxpayers of modest means could actually end up owing the government thousands of dollars if they claimed an improper refund.

The five corporations named as defendants are Chicago Suit: Smart Tax, Inc. of Chicago; Ask Tax, Inc.; Atlanta Suit: Smart Tax of Georgia, Inc.; Detroit Suit: So Far, Inc.; and Raleigh Suit: Smart Tax of North Carolina, Inc.; all Jackson Hewitt Tax Service franchises. The suits also name Farrukh Sohail, who wholly or partially owns each of the five corporations, as co-defendant.

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, the second highest ranking U.S. diplomat, will travel to Libya.

According to the White House, Negroponte will focus on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan as well as build stronger ties with the former "Axis of Evil" leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The trip, which includes stops in Chad, Mauritania and Sudan, will be the first time such a senior member of the State Department visited Libya in over 50 years.

While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been invited to meet with Libyan leaders, ongoing commitments in the Middle East and Washington have so-far kept such a summit from being scheduled.

The Middle East and Asia are driving a boom in global advertising spending. Zenith predicted a spike of 7.7% in spending in Asia in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

In the Middle East and Eastern Europe, advertising spending is growing faster than in North America and Western Europe, which are "maturing rapidly" as advertising markets, Zenith said.

Advertising spending in the Middle East increased by 22.4% between 2005 and 2006, compared with growth of 5.2% in America and 4 per cent in Western Europe. Zenith attributed the huge percentage share in the Middle East to the growth in local economies and high oil prices.

In addition to the Olympics, the U.S. presidential election and the European football championship in Austria and Switzerland next year will be the biggest contributors to overall growth during the next two years. However, Zenith noted, the market should brace itself for a fall in revenues after those big events end.

Personal Injury Class Actions

Many seek to try personal-injury cases as a class action. There is very little chance a nationwide personal-injury class will be certified in any jurisdiction. Pharmaceutical products liability litigation requires the substantive law of fifty different states, and product liability law (as well as the learned intermediary defense) has substantial differences from state to state, making a class impossible. "No class action is proper unless all litigants are governed by the same legal rules."This is because variations in state law may swamp any common issues and defeat predominance."Thus, In re Vioxx Products Liability Litigation held that a nationwide personal-injury class was inappropriate in the Vioxx litigation.

Moreover, as Judge Fallon noted, the individualized issues are complex:

The plaintiffs' allegations that Merck failed to warn doctors adequately regarding the alleged health risks of Vioxx--whether they sound in strict liability or negligence--necessarily turn on numerous individualized issues such as: the alleged injury; what Merck knew about the risks of the alleged injury when the patient was prescribed Vioxx; what Merck told physicians and consumers about those risks in the Vioxx label and other media, what the plaintiffs' physicians knew about these risks from other sources, and whether the plaintiffs' physicians would still have prescribed Vioxx had stronger warnings been given.

Constitutional due process demands Merck have the opportunity to defend against each case individually: "one set of operative facts would not establish liability and the end result would be a series of individual mini-trials which the predominance requirement is intended to prevent." Similarly, the fact that plaintiffs have individualized damages claims, including claims for non-economic damages, prevents compliance with the predominance requirements. (In the now-infamous Dukes v. Wal-Mart case, in order to shoehorn the case into certification, the Ninth Circuit permitted the class plaintiffs to waive what would be billions of dollars of non-economic damages if the complaint's allegations were true, a mechanism that seemed designed to benefit the trial lawyers ahead of any class member that had actually suffered injury.) One would not expect Judge Fallon to certify even the individual state personal-injury class actions.

An interesting question is whether Judge Fallon will be willing to hold that his federal decision would bind pending state-court class action certification decisions, or whether plaintiffs will have the opportunity to shop for a better ruling. Judge Easterbrook in In re Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. held that a federal ruling that a class certification was inappropriate precluded state courts from certifying a class action on the same facts, and that the Anti-Injunction Act did not prohibit a federal court from enjoining such proceedings.

Given the unlikelihood of a personal-injury class action certification, why would the plaintiffs' bar devote any resources? The answer can perhaps be found in the Supreme Court's decision in American Pipe & Construction Co. v. Utah which held that the statute of limitations for individual class members' causes of action were tolled while a class action certification was pending. As Jim Beck and Mark Herrmann point out on their Drug and Device Law blog, this decision creates an incentive to file putative class actions that are not necessarily strong on the merits. Ironically, as the two note, the American Pipe Court justified its holding on the grounds that, without a tolling rule, courts would be deluged with duplicative filings. But American Pipe has had no administrative advantage in practice.

Medical Monitoring Class Actions

Merck faces a variety of class actions seeking medical monitoring relief. Medical monitoring was originally devised as a remedy in the unique case of an airline accident. The case involved depressurization and hypoxia where there was no question that the plaintiff children, refugees from Vietnam, faced irreparable harm without an immediate comprehensive medical exam. Plaintiffs took that precedent and ran with it, seeking to extend it to situations where relief was not so clear-cut.

Courts have differed on the appropriateness of expansion of this new cause of action to cases where plaintiffs have suffered no physical injury. The Supreme Court, for one, rejected medical monitoring as a remedy under the Federal Employers' Liability Act in Metro-North Commuter Railroad v. Buckley, noting the dangers of creating a new cause of action that might create unlimited liability, the difficulties of having a court administer a complicated medical plan, and the individualized nature of plaintiffs' medical conditions. Indeed, a wide-open medical-monitoring cause of action would expose nearly every manufacturer in America to liability, given the possibility of arguing that any given substance from automobile pollution to over-the-counter medicine to saturated fats could bring rise to the need for medical monitoring. Meritorious and meritless claims would be difficult to distinguish, and the confusion would almost certainly encourage fraud. The West Virginia Supreme Court, at the other end of the spectrum, created a medical monitoring cause of action in Bower v. Westinghouse Electric and North American Philips Corporation. A very small risk of injury was sufficient to create a cause of action, and there was no requirement that the medical monitoring be effective, or even that there be oversight by the court to ensure that lump sum payments were used for the sought-after remedy.

The Vioxx medical monitoring class action that is furthest along arises in Judge Higbee's courtroom in Atlantic City, Sinclair v. Merck. The New Jersey Supreme Court had already endorsed a broad medical monitoring remedy in Ayers v. Township of Jackson, which permitted a lump-sum payment in an environmental tort case involving drinking water. Even so, with the exception of environmental torts, New Jersey had only permitted medical monitoring where there was physical injury. Moreover, the New Jersey products liability law required an injury before bringing suit. Thus, Judge Higbee dismissed Sinclair as outside of New Jersey medical monitoring law: a product-liability suit could not claim risk of injury to support a medical monitoring remedy. The New Jersey Court of Appeals reversed on grounds that the dismissal was premature. Still, even if Sinclair returns to the trial court, there remains no evidence that Vioxx has a long-term effect once it has been metabolized from the system, and thus no scientific evidence supporting a medical monitoring remedy.

"Consumer Fraud" Class Actions

The greatest danger to Merck shareholders comes from the dozens of "consumer fraud" class actions seeking recovery under various broad state consumer fraud laws. These lawsuits seek recovery, claiming not that Vioxx caused them personal injury, nor that Vioxx did not effectively alleviate pain, but that, because Merck allegedly failed to disclose information to the public, it received a higher price than it would have otherwise. Plaintiffs argue that the broadest of these consumer fraud laws do not require any showing of reliance, or a showing that the consumers for whom recovery is sought were affirmatively misled. In one such case, International Union of Operating Engineers Local 68 Welfare Fund v. Merck, Judge Higbee held that New Jersey's consumer fraud laws applied to all of Merck's United States sales and certified a nationwide class of third-party insurers; an intermediate court affirmed that class certification, which is now pending before the New Jersey Supreme Court, which will hear argument shortly.

This class action certification did not take into account basic choice-of-law principles by applying New Jersey law to transactions in all fifty states, regardless of the location of the doctor who prescribed the drug, the patient who took the drug, or the third-party payor. The court's rationale asks, in effect, "What state wouldn't want stricter consumer-fraud liability?" But defendants maintain that it is reasonable to assume that several states are concerned about the disincentives created by overdeterrence when consumer liability attaches without injury at the same time liability attaches with injury.

Second, the court undid the statute's requirement that consumer fraud must be shown to cause an individual's injury by rewriting the requirement to fit the class action, and holding that it was sufficient to allege "pervasive" defendant misconduct. But class actions are procedural devices, and cannot change the underlying substantive law or the rights of a defendant to present every available defense (a right reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in Philip Morris v. Williams). Third, it remains unclear how "ascertainable loss" is going to be calculated on a class-wide basis. Every third-party payer has its own individualized means of determining which prescription drugs will be covered by its formulary. Should the Local 68 suit proceed, plaintiffs will seek treble damages disgorging billions of dollars paid to Merck for Vioxx, plus attorneys' fees.

Shareholder Class Actions

Merck stock dropped dramatically when it announced the withdrawal of Vioxx from the market. And where there is a large drop in stock price, a shareholder class action usually follows, demanding that present shareholders compensate previous shareholders' losses (with a substantial commission for the trial lawyers who make the arrangement). Investors who are diversified shareholders are hurt by such lawsuits in the aggregate: the lawsuits merely transfer wealth from their left-hand pocket to their right-hand pocket, because ex ante, one is just as likely to be a seller of an artificially inflated share of stock as a buyer, and shareholder lawsuits do nothing to disgorge wealth from the innocent sellers. (Inside trades are, of course, another matter.) But attorneys' fees are calculated on the aggregate, and, of course, shareholders also pay for the defense of such claims.

A major event in any shareholder class actions comes when the court chooses the lead plaintiff. The internecine battle is especially noteworthy in this instance, because one of the lead firms appointed, Milberg Weiss, is under the shadow of an indictment after two of its regular lead plaintiffs pled guilty to taking kickbacks from the firm. Its lead client fired the firm, but Milberg Weiss did not inform the court, resulting in months of further litigation that was resolved when Milberg Weiss agreed to cut in another firm, Bernstein Litowitz, in the lead-counsel pay-offs. Merck's motion to dismiss the entire case is pending.

Instead of selling only the chip in each PC, Intel's platform strategy -- including Centrino, vPro and Viiv -- dictates an entire hardware bundle of processor, chipset, graphics card and sometimes wireless card.

The time is right to combine Centrino and vPro as business buyers continue to choose notebooks over desktops, said Mooly Eden, vice president of Intel's mobile products group, in a statement.

Intel launched vPro in September as a set of ingredients in desktop PCs sold by Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other vendors. The system allows corporate IT managers to manage PC fleets remotely, fixing their software problems, monitoring security threats and even booting computers up without leaving their seats. That has made vPro-capable desktops popular with enterprise customers including 3M Corp., BMW AG, ING Groep NV, Johns Hopkins University and Verizon Communications Inc., Intel said.

Intel suffered a blow in February, when partner Nokia Corp. walked away from a deal to provide 3G HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) wireless modules on the Centrino platform, leaving it to rely solely on Wi-Fi technology to give mobile PC users wireless Internet access.

Still, Centrino Pro will improve on nearly every aspect of the original standard, holding the line on power consumption while upgrading the processor from single-core to Core 2 Duo, adding enough graphics processing power to handle Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista OS and offering the option of "Turbo Memory," which can cut boot times up to 20 percent by supplementing the PC's hard disk with flash memory.

Even without HSDPA, the wireless capability will improve. Intel said in January it would use the "Kedron" Next-Gen Wireless-N networking card for Centrino, using the IEEE 802.11n standard to allow users to share five times the data at twice the range of their current 802.11a/g cards. The extra bandwidth is critical to support activities like VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) telephony and downloading music files or high-definition video.