Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis LLP (K&L Gates) welcomes partner Andrew Petersen to the firm’s banking and finance group. Petersen will be joined by two associates. All three join the firm from Dechert LLP.

Petersen focuses his practice on real estate financing, advising lenders on secured and structured domestic and international debt, including corporate restructuring. He has experience in both U.S. and European secondary loan markets, acting for high-yield investors purchasing subordinated CMBS pieces, loan tranches, notes and mezzanine loans. His experience also includes acting for loan originators advising on CMBS origination through to securitization.

Tony Griffiths, K&L Gates’ London Administrative Partner, said: “Securitisation and structured finance is a complementary discipline to our existing strengths in finance and real estate. To recruit Andrew, who has published the leading work on European CMBS, is a tremendous step forward for our banking and finance group in London and worldwide and will enhance the firm's fast-growing securitisation, structured finance and banking capabilities.”

The hiring of Petersen’s team follows the September 2006 addition of Trevor Beadle, who also joined K&L Gates from Dechert.

Trial lawyers armed with anti-corporate lawsuits are still a threat despite recent courtroom victories for business, writes a prominent legal commentator.

Recent courtroom results like the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to bounce a punitive-damages case against Philip Morris have spurred optimism in boardrooms and business schools. BusinessWeek recently celebrated with a "How business trounced the trial lawyers" cover.

Yet despite the hubris, class action lawsuits targeting business are still alive and kicking across the country, warned Walter Olson in an editorial in yesterday's Chicago Tribune.

Olson edits the legal blogs Overlawyered.com and PointOfLaw.com and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

He points out that in Louisiana and Mississippi, damage caused by Hurricane Katrina has sparked a feeding frenzy amongst some citizens and their lawyers. The New Orleans municipal government alone recently claimed $77 billion in losses caused by levee breaks.

Nor can tobacco companies in some states afford to breathe easier, as it were. California and Massachusetts recently made it simpler to bring tobacco-addiction suits while Louisiana left part of a huge punitive damages award stand, Olson pointed out.

States like Texas and Alabama have recently seen a sharp decline in lawsuits, Olson conceded, particularly out-of-state asbestos filings. But the effect has been similar to squeezing a balloon - the suits have popped up again in unreformed states like Illinois.

He warns business that, despite contrary media reports, nightmare class action suits are still kicking. "To call this a high-water mark is going to require more evidence than we've seen so far," he concluded.

On Sunday, ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair may one day face war crimes charges before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. Moreno-Ocampo said that the ICC could investigate allegations of war crimes stemming from the conduct of coalition forces in Iraq, so long as Iraq agrees to ratify the Rome Statute and accede to ICC jurisdiction.

In an opinion piece in the newspaper El Pais, published on the fourth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon said the war was "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history".

"We should look more deeply into the possible criminal responsibility of the people who are, or were, responsible for this war and see whether there is sufficient evidence to make them answer for it," Garzon wrote.

"There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation and inquiry to start without more delay," he said.

Garzon, who became famous in 1999 when he tried to extradite Pinochet from Britain and try him for crimes against humanity, was particularly critical of the former Spanish government, a major backer of the Iraq invasion.

In February, Spain's former leader Jose Maria Aznar said he now knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction but "the problem was not having been clever enough to know earlier."

Garzon wrote: "If he didn't know enough, he should be asked why he didn't act prudently, giving United Nations inspectors more leeway instead of doing the opposite in total submission and fidelity to President Bush."

Gaspar Llamazares, head of the left-wing party Izquierda Unida, said he would present a motion to the Spanish parliament that leaders behind the war should face international tribunals.

"People cannot be allowed to make decisions that cause hundreds of thousands of victims, fail to recognise their errors and not have to answer to a court," said Llamazares, whose party is allied to the ruling Socialist party.

Garzon, who took a sabbatical last year to study international terrorism, said the Iraq war had helped incite hatred and garner more support for terrorist training camps.

"In some way, with a terrible lack of awareness, we have been and are helping this monster grow more and more and strengthen by the minute so it is probably invincible," he said.

The federal lawsuit seeks unspecified damages on behalf of six band members, including bassist Alan Longmuir and drummer Derek Longmuir, the brothers who started the group in Edinburgh in 1967.

The band says in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday, that Arista owes it royalties on millions of dollars. That was money generated by selling albums, compact discs, multimedia licenses and merchandise, along with rights to commercials, movies and even telephone ring tones.

The band says in the lawsuit that Arista has taken the position that it has held royalties from the band members until it receives clear instructions from them as to how the money should be distributed.

The lawsuit says a payment of $254,392 in September 1997 was the only one made to the band, well short of the millions of dollars the band believes it is owed.

"Arista's claim over the last 25 years that it does not know who to pay is and always has been a pretext intended to deprive the Rollers of the royalties to which they are entitled," the lawsuit says.

A telephone message left with a lawyer for Arista was not immediately returned Tuesday.

The band, first known as the Saxons, sought a less English-sounding name and found it after throwing a dart that landed on a map near Bay City, Mich., the lawsuit says.

In the United States, the group scored a No. 1 hit with "Saturday Night" and rose high on the charts with "Money Honey," "You Made Me Believe in Magic" and "I Only Want to Be With You" before breaking up in 1981.

A U.S. judge has thrown out a lawsuit challenging the fairness of how Web search leader Google Inc. calculates the popularity of Web sites in determining search results, court papers show.

In a ruling issued Friday that came to light Tuesday, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a lawsuit against Google by parenting information site KinderStart.

The judge also imposed yet-to-be-determined sanctions on KinderStart legal counsel Gregory Yu for making unsupported allegations against Google.

KinderStart sued Google in March 2006 alleging the Mountain View, California-based Internet company had defamed the site by cutting it from its Web search ranking system.

The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company, which features links to information about raising children, accused Google of violations of antitrust, free speech, unfair competition and defamation and libel laws.

In its suit, the company argued its site's sudden demotion in March 2005 to a "zero" ranking in Google's search system had severely harmed its business.

KinderStart had sought class action status on behalf of what is said were many other sites that suffered the same fate as Google fine-tunes Web site rankings in search results.

"KinderStart had failed to explain how Google caused injury to it by a provably false statement ... as distinguished from an unfavorable opinion about KinderStart.com's importance," the judge's ruling states.

In addition, the judge said the plaintiff's counsel should have removed allegations that Google discriminated against or manipulated its Web search rankings after the judge ordered the lawyer to do so in an interim ruling.

"While Yu has brought a novel challenge to a major corporation, it is apparent that to some extent he has overreached in doing so," Fogel said. "Yu had a professional responsibility to refrain from filing such allegations if he did not have appropriate supporting evidence."

The judge granted Google the right to seek attorneys fees for the costs of defending against these specific charges. Both sides have 14 days to file motions before the judge determines monetary damages against Yu.

Yu is with the firm Global Law Group of San Mateo.

"All options are being explored. That's all that we are going to say at this point," he told Reuters, but declined to describe his plans further.

A Google attorney said the company felt vindicated.

"We always felt these claims were unjustified, because courts have consistently rejected complaints over search engine rankings, so we're pleased that Judge Fogel promptly dismissed this case," Google litigation counsel Hilary Ware said in a company statement.

The US Navy on Tuesday played its "state secrets" joker in ongoing attempts to resist a whale-saving lawsuit by an environmental group.

The group bringing the lawsuit, the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), believes high-powered naval sonar can distress, injure, or kill whales and dolphins. It is also suggested that active sonar pulses can disorient cetaceans and cause them to become stranded or lost.

Secretary for the Navy Donald Winter said in a court filing that the plaintiffs' requests for disclosure, if complied with, "could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security".

According to the Navy, the conservationists had requested information on the latitude, longitude, time and date, duration, and name of the exercise for every non-combat use of military sonar by the US Navy anywhere in the world.

The NRDC describes itself as "the US nation's most effective environmental action organisation", and it doesn't intend to let the navy get away with the state secrets ploy.

The memos, organized as charts with entries for each of the federal prosecutors and labeled "for internal DOJ use only," offer new details about disputes over policy, priorities and management styles between the department and several of its U.S. attorneys.

The prosecutors' shortcomings also were listed in a talking-points memo, indicating the willingness of the Justice Department to make public what are normally confidential personnel matters in order to counter its critics.

Justice Department officials hoped that documenting specific reasons for terminating the prosecutors would satisfy demands for more information after Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales and his deputy, Paul J. McNulty, described the dismissals as vaguely "performance-related."

According to the charts, as well as e-mails and other documents made public Monday and Tuesday, Carol C. Lam in San Diego was dismissed for not prosecuting more firearms and border smuggling cases, and for repeatedly missing deadlines.

David C. Iglesias in Albuquerque traveled so much he was considered an "absentee landlord."

In San Francisco, where Kevin Ryan was fired, "the office has become the most fractured office in the nation, morale has fallen to the point that it is harming our prosecutorial efforts and [Ryan] has lost the confidence of many of the career prosecutors who are leaving the office."

The justification was equally sweeping for Paul Charlton in Phoenix: "Repeated instances of insubordination, actions taken contrary to instructions, and actions that were clearly unauthorized."

As for Margaret M. Chiara in Grand Rapids, Mich., the memo advised saying nothing about her dismissal because she had not made public statements in her defense. But the memo also said that "if pushed," the department should say morale in her office was low and that Chiara had lost the support of her staff.

The documents show that in a separate chain of e-mails, former White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers mused in November, a month before the firings, about whether President Bush should be briefed about the terminations.