The State Investment Council has hired a law firm to help recover damages and losses from questionable investments and fees paid to third-party marketing agents.

The council on Tuesday approved the selection of a Day Pitney LLP, which has nine offices on the East Coast, including in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Conn.

The law firm will receive a sliding scale contingency fee based on what it recovers for the state.

1 of the council's former outside investment advisers has pleaded guilty in a New York pension scandal and acknowledged that some investment deals in New Mexico were done because of pressure from politically connected individuals. The names of those people have not been disclosed.

Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP has added three partners to the firm's Labor and Employment practice group: Thomas R. Kaufman, Michael L. Gallion and Gregg A. Fisch.  Kaufman, Gallion and Fisch join Sheppard Mullin's Los Angeles/Century City office from Seyfarth Shaw in Los Angeles, where Kaufman was co-chair of Seyfarth's national wage/hour class action practice group.  

"We are very excited to welcome Tom, Mike and Gregg.  They are tremendously talented and collectively bring a wide range of labor and employment law experience, including a specialization in wage-and-hour law – an area the firm is already known for," said Guy N. Halgren, chairman of Sheppard Mullin.  "We have one of the biggest and best employment practices in California, and this group further strengthens the capabilities of one of our signature practice groups."

"We look forward to joining Sheppard Mullin, a top-notch full service firm with a strong footprint in Los Angeles and throughout California," Kaufman commented.  "I am impressed with the firm's marquee labor and employment practice, including the group's continued growth in recent years and firm management's support in growing it further."  

"I am very excited to continue to practice with Tom and Gregg at Sheppard Mullin.  We are thrilled to be part of a firm with such a distinguished labor and employment group and one with such a strong California platform," said Gallion.  "Sheppard Mullin's labor and employment practice has been well known in California for years and the firm has done an excellent job expanding this brand nationally.  The firm's unwavering commitment to client service, diversity, and its top notch practice groups outside of labor and employment were also big draws."

Kaufman is a wage/hour specialist and has handled more than eighty class actions for a wide variety of industries, including banks and mortgage lenders, hospitals, large newspapers, information technology companies, restaurants, and other retailers.  Kaufman also is experienced in litigating employment discrimination cases, including winning several jury trials.  He received a J.D. from University of California, Los Angeles in 1995.

Gallion is a seasoned employment litigator and counselor.  He has significant experience handling complex employment litigation, including California wage and hour class actions and nationwide discrimination class actions.  Gallion has also developed a significant counseling practice, regularly advising clients on the most challenging aspects of employment law, including workforce reclassifications, mergers and acquisitions, reductions in force, and high-profile investigations. He has been recognized as a Southern California Super Lawyer and was recognized by Chambers in 2009 and 2010 as a leader in his field.  Gallion received a J.D., Order of the Coif, from the University of Tennessee in 1995.

Fisch has extensive experience in all aspects of employment litigation, and has successfully defended management before federal and state courts and administrative agencies in defense of complaints for class action and single-plaintiff matters, involving wage-and-hour violations, wrongful termination, age, race, gender, and national origin discrimination, sexual harassment, retaliation, and other statutory, contract and tort-related claims, as well as in relation to union campaigns and elections.  He received a J.D. from New York University School of Law in 1996.  

Sheppard Mullin has 200 attorneys based in its Los Angeles offices and its Labor and Employment practice group includes 75 attorneys firmwide. 

About Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP

Sheppard Mullin is a full service AmLaw 100 firm with 550 attorneys in 11 offices located in the United States and Asia.  Since 1927, companies have turned to Sheppard Mullin to handle corporate and technology matters, high stakes litigation and complex financial transactions.  In the U.S., the firm's clients include more than half of the Fortune 100.  For more information, please visit www.sheppardmullin.com. 

A 76-year-old Connecticut man has been arrested after authorities discovered he was released from a mental hospital in 1992 after being found incompetent to stand trial for a 1991 murder.

Prosecutors say they should have been notified 18 years ago when Pedro Custodio was released from a state hospital in Newtown. Authorities had expected Custodio to be committed to the hospital for much longer.

A judge had asked about the status of the case this month because it had been open for almost two decades. Custodio was arrested Monday and ordered held on $200,000 bail during a court appearance Tuesday.

Custodio's sister tells the Republican-American newspaper that the state approved his release from the hospital. She says his arrest this week amounts to a death sentence.

A judge sentenced a Chattanooga woman to 42 months in prison for faking breast cancer and told her it was "reprehensible" that she took donations of sick leave, money and cancer patient support services for five years.

"It seems like to me some confinement is necessary," Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Don Poole said Monday after a four-hour hearing in which attorneys for 39-year-old Keele Maynor asked for a probation sentence that would allow her to work and pay about $54,000 in restitution.

Poole added 10 years of probation to the sentence for Maynor, a mother of three, and ordered her taken into custody immediately. She will be eligible for parole after serving one-third of the prison sentence. He ordered her to start making $300 monthly restitution payments after her release.

Tribune Co. believes it will still emerge from bankruptcy protection this year even though a court-appointed examiner concluded that talks leading up to a leveraged buyout of the company had bordered on fraud.

In a memo to employees, Tribune CEO Randy Michaels and Chief Operating Officer Gerald Spector said they agreed with only some of the conclusions in Monday's report, while disputing others. They did not go into specifics, saying it would be premature to comment while the full examiner's report remains under court seal.

A hearing on whether to release the nearly 700-page document was scheduled for Thursday in Wilmington, Del.

The 2007 leveraged buyout took the company private and ultimately helped land it in Chapter 11. The deal has drawn scrutiny from bondholders who are trying to recover more of their money.

Real estate mogul Sam Zell led the deal, which piled on what turned out to be an unsustainable amount of debt. The company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angles Times and other properties, filed for Chapter 11 protection in December 2008.

A Springdale woman has been sentenced to six months of work release and fined $2,000 in the heat stroke deaths of her two children who had locked themselves in the trunk of a car.

Twenty-five-year-old Katrina Markley pleaded guilty Monday to two misdemeanor counts of third-degree endangering the welfare of a minor in the deaths of 5-year-old Curtis Markley and 4-year-old Virginia Markley. She was sentenced to six months of work release that involves supervised community service work during the day and nights spent in a barracks-style building at the county jail.

Police say Markley admitted she was on the computer most of the day when her children locked themselves in the trunk of a car in June 2009 and died of heat stroke.

With more than $67 billion of its insurance coverage placed into a special receivership fund, Ambac Assurance Corp. is flirting with financial ruin. Yet at the same time, lawyers and consultants helping Wisconsin regulators navigate the complex case have collected nearly $18 million for their efforts.

And the meter is still running.

At the top of the billing list, state records show, is Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm with close ties to Gov. Jim Doyle. Employees of Foley have contributed $355,596 to Doyle's campaigns since 1999, more than any other group from one employer, according to data analyzed by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign at the Journal Sentinel's request.

Foley, the state's largest law firm, has billed the state $6.6 million for its work on the Ambac case since it was hired in February 2008 - more than four times the next highest sum paid to an outside special counsel for one case since Doyle took office in 2003, according to the state attorney general's office.

Three Foley attorneys, including David Walsh, a longtime friend and major contributor to Doyle, have billed more than $1 million each for their Ambac work. Walsh and members of his family have contributed $64,520 to Doyle's campaigns since 1999, including $40,520 since 2003, topping the list of all individual contributors to Doyle, according to the Democracy Campaign, which analyzes campaign finance reports filed with the state.

Marc Marotta, a Doyle confidant who chaired his 2006 campaign and served on the governor's cabinet, is a Foley partner who has billed 24 hours on the Ambac case. State Insurance Commissioner Sean Dilweg, who hired Foley for the Ambac case, was a top aide to Marotta in the state Department of Administration before being named insurance commissioner in 2007.