The lease was for the entire 14th floor of the building. Howard Greenberg, president of Howard Properties Ltd., was the exclusive tenant representative for Kaufman Borgeest & Ryan, in partnership with Barry Lewen and Lewis Cowan of Grubb & Ellis. This was the 13th lease transaction in which Greenberg had represented the law firm since 2000, totaling more than 126,000 sf of space.

Cowan tells GlobeSt.com that the lease term is 15 years. He notes that in terms of economics, it was a competitive market deal, but he could not provide an aggregate lease value at this time. He did confirm however, that asking rent is around $45 at the property.

Cowan also explains that the reason for the move was a value play. "They could get much more for their dollar within the framework of the transaction." Kaufman Borgeest & Ryan was approaching the expiration of a lease for 26,000 sf in Midtown at 99 Park Ave.

The law firm of Locke, Lord, Bissell & Liddell LLP (LLBL), has formed a new Financial Guaranty Insurers Section to aid financial guaranty insurers who will soon be traveling through a maze of legal issues surrounding the securities they insure in the subprime lending sector.

"The housing downturn is threatening to cripple some bond insurers that wrote billions of dollars of guarantees in the past few years on securities backed by risky subprime-mortgage debt because they entered into contracts known as credit-default swaps," said Brian Casey with LLB&L. "These events are also forcing the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) and its constituent insurance regulators to reconsider how bond insurers should be regulated, particularly with respect to the insurer's backing of derivative financial instruments."

The firm says new cases are already surfacing in the marketplace.

"We are currently following over 200 active lawsuits in the United States directly resulting from the collapse of the subprime market, and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg," said Tom Cunningham, LLB&L's Class Actions Practice Group Leader.

Two Houston law firms made the cut among the top advisers to merger and acquisition clients conducting deals in 2007, a new report shows.

Vinson & Elkins LLP, which is ranked as the second largest in the local market, according to the Houston Business Journal 2008 Book of Lists, was 18th out of 20 firms with 101 M&A deals worth $102.6 billion during the year according to M&A advisory and research firm The Mergermarket Group.

The firm also placed 14th, up from 23rd in 2006, in the ranking of legal advisers to North American buyout deals, working 12 transactions with a value of $46 billion.

Baker Botts LLP, the third-largest Houston firm, ranked 18th on the North American buyout list, involved in two deals worth $44 billion.

The top-ranked legal advisers in M&A deals in 2007 in four measured categories were:

New York-based Sullivan & Cromwell LLP (total North American M&A value $470.8 billion);

Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins LLP (most deals, 303);

New York-based Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP (total North American buyout value $156.4 billion); and

Kirkland & Ellis LLP of Chicago (total number of buyout deals, 85).

West Des Moines, Iowa, January 4, 2008:  Cambridge Economics Group today announced a new service for attorneys and their clients who are involved in medical malpractice cases.  The service, MedMal ExpressTM, is provided through the company's Internet site, www.medmalreports.com.  Users can sign up for a 2-week free trial, after which the service is $95 per month.

"The innovation of MedMal ExpressTM is that it lets users see expected settlements in up to 20 cases or case scenarios in real time," said Dr. David M. Frankel, Founder and Chief Economist of CEG.  "Our predictions are tailored to the lawsuit's location as well as other key case parameters."
"MedMal ExpressTM is intended for attorneys and clients on both sides of a lawsuit," Dr. Frankel added.  The company suggests the following potential uses for its new service:

•Advising insurance companies how much money to reserve in a case.
•Evaluating potential case strategies. For instance:
- adding or dropping a defendant;
- choosing which accusations to stress.

•Testing different case scenarios. For example:
- If the case against one or more defendants is dismissed;
- If the plaintiff's medical outcome changes.

MedMal ExpressTM uses CEG's proprietary predictive model, which is derived from patterns of payments in the National Practitioners Data Bank, a repository of essentially all malpractice payments made in the U.S.   The model considers the following key features of a case:

•The trial location (U.S. state)
•The age, gender, and medical outcome of the patient
•The number of defendants
•The defendants' ages and job descriptions
•The accusations made against each defendant

"But our model goes one step further," Dr. Frankel stated.  "It also considers important interactions between these features.  For instance, some states have caps on pain and suffering that reduce payments for certain outcomes (such as purely emotional injuries) more than others.  This means that the effect of medical outcome on payments depends on the state.  By taking account of this and other important interactions, we can generate very realistic predictions of the expected settlement in a case."

Note to Journalists

Journalists and other opinion leaders who wish to try MedMal Express without entering credit card information are asked to set up a user account on the site, medmalreports.com, and then to send their user name to CEG using the General Inquiry button on the medmalreports.com home page.  A MedMal Express trial subscription will be set up for you.

About Cambridge Economics Group

Cambridge Economics Group was founded in 2004 to provide economic and statistical analysis in complex litigation settings, including antitrust, intellectual property, regulation, and personal injury.  Its offices are located in West Des Moines, Iowa.

Dr. David M. Frankel is a tenured economics professor at Iowa State University and has been a visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford.  His research has appeared in leading economics journals such as Econometrica and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.  Dr. Frankel received his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1993.  He has an M.S. in Sociology from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude).  Prior to joining the faculty at Iowa State, Dr. Frankel taught for eight years at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

http://www.medmalreports.com

The complaint charges WSB Financial and certain of its officers and directors with violations of the Securities Act of 1933 (the "Securities Act"). The complaint also alleges that D.A. Davidson - who acted as acted as "Lead Underwriter" of the IPO - violated the Securities Act.

Specifically, the complaint alleges that, in connection with the IPO, defendants issued numerous materially false and misleading statements which caused WSB Financial's securities to trade at artificially inflated prices. As alleged in the complaint, the Company's registration statement for the IPO failed to disclose that the Company had been violating certain banking laws and regulations relating to the origination, administration and monitoring of construction and mortgage loans. Due to the Company's misleading statements, WSB Financial's stock hit an intra-day high of $21 per share during the Class Period.

According to the complaint, beginning in September 2007, a series of announcements and investigations into the Company's lending practices caused WSB Financial's stock to plummet. For example, in late September, the Company announced that due to the reduced demand of mortgage loans, the Company was eliminating thirty-three jobs in its mortgage division. Moreover, the Company announced that its Executive Vice President of Sales and Lending at Westsound Bank had been terminated. The complaint alleges that as a result of these announcements, the Company's stock fell from $15.30 per share to $12.40 per share. Then, the Company announced that state and federal regulators were looking into possible fraud and misconduct in its real estate lending practices. Within two days of this announcement the Company's stock dropped nearly 60 percent, from $11.20 on October 24, 2007 to $4.73 on October 25, 2007.

If you are a member of the class, you may, no later than January 2, 2007, request that the Court appoint you as Lead Plaintiff of the class. Any member of the purported class may move the Court to serveas Lead Plaintiff through counsel of their choice or may choose to remain an absent class member.

Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, P.L.L.C. has significant experience in prosecuting investor class actions and actions involving securities fraud. The firm has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and London, and is active in major litigation pending in federal and state courts throughout the nation. You may visit the firm's website at www.cmht.com.

The network that burst into public consciousness with the O.J. Simpson trial and other big-name courtroom dramas in the 1990s becomes part of television history Tuesday, renamed truTV to emphasize its prime-time action programming.

Besides the name, there won't be many immediate changes to what Court TV has become. The six remaining hours of legal-oriented material during the day will remain, labeled ''In Session.''

The Tuesday premiere of ''Ocean Force Huntington Beach O.C.'' typifies the network's direction. The series follows lifeguards on a busy California beach, emphasizing heart-pounding rescues rather than hours spent ogling hot bodies.

That's about as far from swearing in a witness as you can get, but Court TV's viewers are used to the disconnect.

Court TV prime-time has emphasized non-fiction series like the long-running ''Forensic Files'' and newer shows like ''The Real Hustle,'' which interviews pickpockets about tricks of the trade; the upcoming ''Black Gold,'' about oil prospectors; and ''Speeders,'' which shows tapes of people trying to talk their way out of speeding tickets.

That's part of an intensely competitive television world; ''Black Gold'' taps into the same fascination with grueling jobs as ''Deadliest Catch'' on Discovery and ''Ice Road Truckers'' on The History Channel, for example.

Now the network takes the risk of shedding an established brand for the unknown.

''It's a big concern,'' conceded Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, which includes the soon-to-become truTV. ''Court TV is a very well-defined programming entity. Unfortunately, it's not as broad and doesn't offer the growth opportunities, we believe, as starting anew.''

Koonin oversaw the successful brandings of TNT and TBS. Those networks established clear identities -- TNT is for drama, TBS does comedy -- while keeping names that are essentially meaningless.

TruTV's identity will be fast-moving programming that tells real stories about real people. There's such a glut of reality programming with a wide range of styles that truTV is making an explicit point of rejecting the term.

TruTV isn't reality, its new slogan states. It's actuality.

''Reality has a connotation of not being real, of being phony,'' said Marc Juris, executive vice president and general manager of truTV. ''We felt that because [our programming] was real, we couldn't call it reality.''