The admission came as part of a $75 million settlement in a case involving more than 165 lawsuits filed against some of the nation's largest corporations from the 1970s through 2005, prosecutors said in a statement released late Monday.

Then known as Milberg Weiss, the firm dominated the field of securities class-action lawsuits involving shareholders who claim they suffered losses because executives misled them about a company's financial condition. Milberg's lawsuits targeted AT&T Inc., Lucent, WorldCom, Microsoft Corp., Prudential Insurance and other companies.

As part of the settlement, prosecutors will not pursue criminal charges against Milberg, which has retained a compliance monitor.

U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien said the settlement reflects the seriousness of what was probably the longest-running scheme ever conducted by a law firm.

"The monetary payment will punish the firm for allowing this conduct to occur, and the compliance monitor should ensure that Milberg will not again lie to judges presiding over cases it is litigating." O'Brien said.

The deal was initially disclosed Monday by Sanford Dumain, a member of Milberg's executive committee. If the criminal case had gone forward, the firm risked having to pay forfeitures and penalties of hundreds of millions of dollars, he said.

The firm was charged with aiding and abetting mail fraud and with money-laundering conspiracy. A trial had been expected to start in August.

A seven-year investigation has resulted in guilty pleas by three former partners.

David Safavian, the former chief of staff for the General Services Administration, was convicted of lying to investigators about his relationship with Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who has admitted bribing government officials. Safavian was sentenced to 18 months in prison but the sentence was put on hold while the appeal played out.

"David Safavian has been destroyed by this," attorney Barbara Van Gelder, who defended Safavian at trial, said Tuesday. "He has been debarred. He's been unemployable and he's been seen as a villain. This is vindication."

His conviction was based on statements he made to Senate investigators, GSA ethics officials and the agency's inspector general. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out the charges related to ethics officials and the inspector general and ordered a new trial on the other charges.

The court unanimously agreed that when Safavian asked whether he could ethically travel to Scotland for a golf trip with Abramoff, he was not required to tell ethics officials that he'd been providing Abramoff information about government-owned properties.

Lori Drew, 49, a neighbor of the dead teen, was to make an appearance in federal court here Monday, accused of one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress.

The charges were filed in California where MySpace is based. MySpace is a subsidiary of Beverly Hills-based Fox Interactive Media Inc., which is owned by News Corp.

Drew, of suburban St. Louis, allegedly helped create a fake MySpace account to convince Megan Meier she was chatting with a nonexistent 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans.

Megan Meier hanged herself at home in October 2006, allegedly after receiving a dozen or more cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her. Drew has denied creating the account or sending messages to Meier.

A prominent Charleston law firm has filed suit against the company that produces Verizon's phone books, saying its ad was screwed up in the latest Charleston edition.

Richard Neely and Mike Callaghan filed the suit for Neely & Callaghan on June 10 in Kanawha Circuit Court.

The attorneys claim Idearc Media Corp. ran an incorrect ad for the firm. The ad mostly had copy for Neely & Hunter, Neely's former firm.

"What it does is paints our firm and us as individuals in a false light to the public," Callaghan said Wednesday. "If you look at what's in the book, the way it reads, it says Callaghan at top, but lists Hunter in the bottom. It puts me and our firm in a false light."

Neely is a former state Supreme Court justice and Yale Law School graduate, and Callaghan is a former Congressional candidate, former federal prosecutor, former state Secretary for the Environment and former chair of the state Democratic Party.

"Neely & Callaghan does not advertise in the greater Charleston area because the lawyers are well known," the attorneys claim in the suit. "The primary vehicle for connecting clients with Neely & Callaghan is the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory prepared by Defendant."

The suit says Neely and Roger Hunter's partnership ended in May 2007. Hunter now is with Spilman Thomas & Battle.

In November, according to the suit, Neely & Callaghan purchased an ad with Idearc. The correct version of the ad appeared in the Teays Valley edition of the Verizon phone book.

But the ad that ran in the Charleston edition was headlined Neely & Callaghan, but the ad included information about Neely and Hunter. That included misrepresenting services the new firm offers.

Neely & Callaghan's office manager asked to see a draft version of the ad, but was told that Idearc doesn't do that, according to the suit.

"Now, for an entire year, the staff of Neely & Callaghan must take calls for Roger D. Hunter and waste its time properly referring those calls to the correct firm," the attorneys claim in the suit.

The attorneys also say Idearc libeled the firm by filing a false statement to credit reporting agencies that they didn't pay for the ad when Idearc knew that it had breached its contract with them and no debt was owed.

The defendants "regular course of conduct is to extort money from wronged customers after [it] has breached its contract by threatening to refuse to publish further advertisements in its quasi-monopoly telephone directories if wronged customers fail to pay charges for contracts that were nonetheless breached," the suit states.

The lawsuit seeks a maximum of $75,000 in compensatory and punitive damages as well as court costs and interest.

"We will be quantifying damages, yes," Callaghan said. "Some are unquantifiable in respect to reputation. There's not a formula to say how much. But yes, we will be looking at those numbers.

"We are looking at our phone call volume to determine how much it's gone down. We are looking to see who has trouble getting a hold of us. It's me in particular. But it says we do work that we don't do. We're a top-shelf litigation firm. We defend people and sue people. It paints us falsely as saying we do things like structured business buyouts and securities.

"I hate that we had to file the suit, but that's life."

With office for Idearc located in the same building as his law firm, Callaghan said it has been awkward at times.

"We like them, and we get along with them fine," he said. "They messed up, and we asked them to help out. And now we're here where we are."

Wharton Aldhizer and Weaver, a Harrisonburg-based law firm, won the award for most food collected in the Blue Ridge region "Legal Food Frenzy," a food drive competition among the state's legal community.

Wharton Aldhizer and Weaver donated 25,338 pounds of food, 31 percent of all of the food donated to the food bank in this region.

Statewide, law firms gathered more than 1.36 million pounds of food for state food banks, enough for more than 1 million meals. This amount doubles last year's total of almost 679,000 pounds raised, and surpasses this year's goal of 1 million pounds.

More than 180 law firms participated in seven regions. The Blue Ridge region is served by the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, which includes Rockingham, Page, Shenandoah and Augusta counties.

Settlements with three law firms and lawyers in Upstate, Long Island and Westchester ending improper employment arrangements with school districts and a Central New York Board of Cooperative Educational Services have been announced by the Attorney General’s office.The settlements also rescind all public benefits wrongfully received and require the law firms and lawyers to pay the state a total $235,000.

At the same time, top state lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly joined with the Attorney General in announcing plans to introduce legislation that would finally end the abuses of the public pension system.The settlements come as part of Cuomo’s statewide investigation into the public pension systems and are with the Central New York firm of Ferrara, Fiorenza, Larrison, Barrett and Reitz P.C., the New York City firm of Aiello and Cannick and Long Island attorney Gilbert Henoch.

“Systemic abuse in the public pension and benefits systems has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars,” said Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. “We will continue to examine school districts and BOCES throughout the state to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not being wasted by providing pensions to lawyers who are not state employees or other unwarranted perks and benefits.  It may have been common practice for decades but it ends now, and I am working with leaders in the Senate and Assembly to pass legislation shutting down the abuses for good.”

Newly appointed Ohio Attorney General Nancy Hardin Rogers has shifted job duties for her second-in-command and taken other steps to wipe out any perceived conflicts of interest with two law firms.

Rogers, the former Ohio State University law dean who was appointed attorney general a week ago, informed her staff on Tuesday that Thomas Winters, first assistant attorney general, would be shifted to chief deputy attorney general. Rogers made the shift because both she and Winters have ties to Vorys Sater Seymour and Pease LLP, Central Ohio's largest law firm. Vorys, which handles a number of cases for the attorney general's office, employs Rogers' husband, Douglas, and was where Winters worked before joining former AG Marc Dann's staff last year.

With both top staffers in the office associated with the firm, a change had to be made, spokesman Jim Gravelle said. Before Dann resigned from office May 14, Winters - the only other employee permitted to handle attorney general's duties under state law - could step away from any case involving Vorys.

The office doesn't consider Winters' new post a demotion as he's still the chief lawyer for legal and law-enforcement matters, Gravelle said. Sheryl Creed Maxfield, a 24-year veteran of the office, will take the first assistant's post.

Rogers on Tuesday said Maxfield has the discretion to continue or discontinue cases Vorys handles, but the office will halt any new special-counsel appointments with the firm.

While the attorney general's office has no current association with Pittsburgh-based Buchanan Ingersoll and Rooney PC, which employs Rogers' daughter, Jill Spiker, the office won't contract the firm until Rogers steps down as attorney general or the Ohio Ethics Commission makes a formal ruling regarding a potential conflict of interest.

Rogers' actions Tuesday put any issues or contracts related to Ohio State, Vorys and Buchanan Ingersoll squarely in Maxfield's charge.