The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission picked an outside lawyer to head its division responsible for overseeing brokerages, credit rating agencies and stock markets, the SEC said on Tuesday.

Robert Cook, 44, is currently a partner at law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, where he has been working since 1992.

Cook is expected to start in early 2010 as director of the SEC's division of trading and markets, where he will tackle controversial agency proposals such as one to curb short selling and reinstate an updated version of the 'uptick rule.'

His division will most likely be in charge of supervising a large section of the $450 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market.

Bills to regulate the private swaps industry are winding through the House of Representatives and on Tuesday, a draft Senate bill was made public that would clamp down on the financial instruments. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission would also gain authority over the opaque market blamed in part for exacerbating the financial crisis.

Cook has extensive experience working on swaps transactions, new financial products and structures as well as securities trading, the SEC said in a statement.

A former lawyer with the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission pleaded guilty Monday to conspiring with a prominent Manhattan lawyer to dupe hedge funds out of tens of millions of dollars.

Robert Miller, 52, of Englewood, N.J., entered the plea to conspiracy and securities fraud charges in a cooperation deal with prosecutors in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Monday. If his cooperation is unsuccessful, he could face up to 25 years in prison at a sentencing scheduled for Feb. 5.

Miller admitted conspiring with lawyer Marc Dreier in November 2008 as Dreier sought to sell more than $44 million in fictitious securities to hedge funds.

Miller was a staff attorney in the SEC's enforcement division from about 1983 through 1986. Since then, he has worked as an analyst and money manager at various firms in the securities industry, according to court papers.

A charging document filed with the court said Miller and Dreier managed an investment fund together at various times between 1999 and 2008.

Prosecutors said Dreier last year contacted Miller and offered to pay him $100,000 to impersonate a representative of a Canadian pension plan during a phone call with a New York hedge fund.

They said Miller received a call from representatives of the hedge fund the day after he agreed to do it. Prosecutors said Miller received the call on a cell phone Dreier gave him with a Canadian area code and phone number.

The government said Dreier wired $100,000 into Miller's bank account shortly after Miller impersonated the Canadian pension fund representative, discussing the guarantee that the pension plan had supposedly issued for the $44.7 million note.

It said Miller also in two separate phone calls impersonated a representative of an Icelandic hedge fund that was supposedly selling a financial note. Court papers said Dreier directed an assistant at his firm, Dreier LLP, to look up weather in Reykjavik, Iceland, so Miller was better prepared for the calls.

Federal prosecutors accused a high-profile South Florida attorney of concocting a Ponzi scheme that lured millions of dollars from investors with promises of big payoffs from legal settlements that never existed, according to court documents filed Monday.

The civil complaint, seeking forfeiture of eight pieces of property owned by lawyer Scott Rothstein, marks the first time prosecutors have leveled fraud allegations at him_ even though criminal charges have yet to be announced. It was filed the same day FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents seized luxury cars, boats, bank accounts and other possessions of the once high-flying Rothstein. The forfeiture complaint put the value of the real estate at more than $18 million.

In the complaint, prosecutors claim that Rothstein operated the Ponzi scheme since 2005 using his law firm, Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler. Investors were promised fat profits of 20 percent or more by paying lump sums to people who had won legal settlements that would supposedly pay out larger amounts over a longer period.

It was all a lie, the complaint contends. Like all Ponzi schemes, new investor money was used to pay earlier investors to keep up an illusion of success, backed up by false documents showing bank accounts containing fictional large sums.

The Senate gave President Barack Obama a major victory Monday in his efforts to remake the federal courts, confirming a judge who will tip the political balance on the once-conservative appeals court based in Richmond.

The 72-16 vote for U.S. District Judge Andre Davis gives Democratic nominees a 6-5 edge on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been tough in death penalty cases, backed abortion restrictions and supported President George W. Bush's detainee policies.

Davis, of Baltimore, was the sixth of Obama's court nominees to be confirmed, including Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Immediately after approving Davis, the Senate voted 88-0 to confirm a seventh Obama nominee — Charlene Edwards Honeywell — for a district court seat in Florida.

Despite the overwhelming support for both nominees, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking committee Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama squared off in a never-ending battle over judges. Each blamed the other's party for years of blocking tactics.

Leahy pointed out that 28 judges were confirmed during Bush's first year. Sessions argued that the average time from nomination to confirmation for Bush's appellate court nominees was 350 days, a far longer wait than for Davis, who was nominated April 2. Sessions opposed his confirmation.

Davis had been caught in judicial politics before. President Bill Clinton nominated him for the 4th Circuit in October 2000, but the Senate didn't vote before Bush took office.

Prior to the Senate votes Monday, there were 21 appellate vacancies and 76 more for district courts. Since the Supreme Court usually hears about 80 cases a year, the appellate courts usually are the last judicial stop in deciding many of the nation's most controversial legal issues.

No appellate court has been more ripe for change than the 4th Circuit, which hears appeals from courts in West Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Virginia. Senators have battled for years over its nominees, leaving seats unfilled for years.

Should techniques for training horses be eligible for a patent? What about a system for choosing a jury or fail-proof method for speed dating?

Supreme Court justices raised the questions Monday as they struggled to decide what types of inventions should qualify for patent protection.

In a case that has put software and bioscience companies on edge, the justices debated whether processes or methods of doing business should be eligible for protection. The dispute has raised serious questions about whether software programs, medical procedures, financial transactions and other nontangible inventions should be able to obtain patents like those granted to physical devices. And it left the high court grappling with the line between abstract processes and concrete applications.

Monday's oral arguments made clear that the justices are skeptical that the business method at the center of the case before them — a process of hedging weather-related risk in energy prices — deserves a patent. Some saw a risk in using the current case to set broad precedent on what can and cannot be patented.

The court's newest justice, Sonia Sotomayor, asked the lawyer defending the hedging application how the high court can limit patent protection to "something that is reasonable?"

In 1997, inventors Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw applied for a patent on a process that can be used by residential and commercial customers to lock in fixed energy bills, even during an unusually cold winter. The Patent Office concluded the process was too abstract and denied the application.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the Patent Office decision last year and said a process is eligible for a patent only if it is "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" or if it "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing." The circuit court said Bilski's process did not meet that test.

The question before the Supreme Court on Monday was whether the "machine-or-transformation" test is the right standard.

Michael Jakes, the attorney representing Bilski and Warsaw, told the high court that the test is too "rigid and narrow" and would exclude too many useful innovations in today's information-based economy, including his clients' hedging technique.

A judge tasked with unraveling an alleged $2.8 million kickback scheme involving two Pennsylvania judges says they presided over a juvenile justice system "run amok."

Senior Bucks County Judge Arthur Grim told a state investigatory panel Monday that former Judge Mark Ciavarella (shiv-uh-REL'-uh) sentenced juvenile offenders to jail without exploring the charges against them.

Grim's testimony follows his review of thousands of cases after the scandal came to light.

Ciavarella and former Luzerne County Judge Michael Conahan are accused of accepting payoffs from two private juvenile detention centers.

The state Supreme Court last month threw out thousands of juvenile cases that came before Ciavarella. It said none of the young offenders got a fair hearing.

hen Biopure Corp. decided to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July, the biotech was already working with Ropes & Gray LLP, the largest law firm in Boston.

But Biopure CEO Zaf Zafirelis decided to tap a much smaller firm, a 26-lawyer Boston-based outfit called Craig & Macauley PC with virtually no name recognition, to handle its bankruptcy proceedings.

“I was very, very impressed with the clarity with which they outlined what was going to happen,” said Zafirelis. “It’s a traumatic event for any company to file for bankruptcy. I can honestly say that working through this whole thing with (Craig & Macauley) made it a lot simpler for us.”

Like Craig and Macauley, bankruptcy boutiques across the country have been quietly booming in this economy as bankruptcies and workouts soar. Unlike large law firms which have been pummeled by the recession, forcing them to fire lawyers and entirely rethink established business practices, these smaller bankruptcy shops say the current economy is actually an opportunity to shine.

In major U.S. cities, Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings have spiked during the past 12 months as companies run out of cash and banks come to collect. In Boston, Chapter 11 filings have nearly doubled over the past year to 115 total cases in Boston during the period between January 1 and September 30, 2009, compared to 58 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings during the same period last year, according to a review of filings at the Boston office of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Boston.

Bankruptcy boutiques are in a unique position to cash in on the boom because nationally, there are literally only dozens that focus specifically on business bankruptcies, as opposed to individual bankruptcy filings. Smallfirms that have substantial bankruptcy practices include Craig & Macauley, Hanify & King PC in Boston, Warner Stevens LLP in Fort Worth, Texas and Shaw Gussis Fishman Glantz Wolfson & Towbin in Chicago. While most large law firms have bankruptcy practices, they are conflicted out of handling many

cases because they also work with large financial institutions. The sparse number of boutique bankruptcy firms can also be explained by the fact that the work is cyclical and once the boom arrives, the matters are deeply complex.

Peter Roberts a partner with the bankruptcy law firm Shaw Gussis Fishman Glantz Wolfson & Towbin LLC in Chicago, says his firm began to see an uptick in work about six months ago for the types of companies the firm works with, which tends to be smaller to middle market businesses. In Chicago, Chapter 11 filings have more than doubled to 241 during the first three quarters of 2009, compared to 96 during the same period last year, according to U.S. Bankruptcy Court filings.