After Lehman Brothers Holding Co. filed for bankruptcy, lawsuits have been flying. One in particular is in the heart of Silicon Valley, California’s San Mateo County. Suing execs and accountants for $150 million in losses, Lehman Bros. is in for a bumpy ride.

Filed Thursday, individual execs such as chief executive officer Richard Fuld and Ernst & Young, the firm’s accountants and others were named in the suit. Accusing Fuld and others of fraud, the lawsuit claims that the team allegedly made it appear publicly that the company was financially strong while in reality they were “scrambling to save it from collapse.”

The suit is asking for a return of exec’s bonuses to repay for damages suffered by the county’s schools, hospitals, transit district and individual cities. Weil Gotshal & Manges in New York are representing Lehman’s bankruptcy case and have not commented on this story.

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Filing for bankruptcy is very popular right now. Times are tough and people can’t keep up. However, don’t fret too much! Although things are difficult, something has got to give. For example, changes are in the air regarding the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. Therefore, according to The National Law Journal, a well thought out plan may give individuals who are guarantors of real estate companies the option to reorganize under Chapter 11 and retain one or more of the companies and the buildings owned by them without any continuing guarantee liability.

And if that’s the case…many of these Chapter 11 filings will not have to see a courtroom. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Rather than lose hope, search for alternatives offered out there. They do exist.

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There are those law schools with great reps and then there are the other ones…Well, it appears that the Barkley School of Law is on Team B, the shady team, and after being faced with a lawsuit, disturbing allegations by students, new leadership, dwindling enrollment, and a name change, the school is planning on shutting its doors for good.

Having filed bankruptcy, the Kentucky law school is officially withdrawing its application with the state for a license to operate in 2009. The question is…how will that impact the students? Well, they’re going to have to switch schools and finish their degree somewhere new. And for those practicing lawyers with degrees from the Barkley School of Law, this could definitely discredit their diploma and ultimately effect their career. I foresee a lawsuit in the making…

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(Venice, CA) One of the leaders in online legal documents, RealDealDocs.com, has released a free preview of the Linens ‘N Things Agency Agreement. The agreement was drafted by a number of top lawyers, including 2008 Amlaw Honored law firm Wachtell Lipton. To view the Linens ‘N Things Agency Agreement from RealDealDocs.com, click here.

An Agency Agreement is a legal document creating a fiduciary relationship whereby the first party (”the principal”) agrees that the actions of a second party (”the agent”) binds the principal to later agreements made by the agent as if the principal had himself personally made the later agreements. Basically, an agency agreement denotes a relationship in which one person has legal authority to act for another. The typical agency agreement relationships are those between a guardian and ward, executor or administrator with a decedent, and an employer with an employee.

The Linens ‘N Things agency agreement could be classified as an employer-employee agency agreement. The agreement lays out the terms by which the Tiger Capital Group will sell all of the Linens ‘N Things merchandise due to the store filing bankruptcy.

As the economy slips into a recession, more and more businesses are closing their doors. Going out of business sales have become a staple in American capitalism. In order to pay off debts and sell their businesses, companies opt to elect financial corporations to sell off their wares, as in the Linens ‘N Thing agency agreement.

RealDealDocs.com is an online legal document resource that hosts a number of agency agreements for all types of purposes, including that of the Linens ‘N Things agency agreement. The website boasts over a million different legal documents from agreements to contracts to clauses and more for use as samples and templates.

The legal documents at RealDealDocs.com are drafted by the top law firms of the country and are used by both the largest corporations and the smallest of small capital companies alike. Lawyers, laymen and entrepreneurs utilize RealDealDocs.com as a shrewd business tool to see how the biggest and most influential business deals are made.

RealDealDocs.com is a membership site, and while everyone is welcome to search their many legal documents and view previews of those documents, members have the additional option to download and print the documents for their own use and convenience. The legal document database at RealDealDocs.com can be searched by category, law firm, legal parties, state and more.

To search for Agency Agreements by state, click here.

To visit the RealDealDocs.com database, click here.

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Lawyers are downright worried about the U.S. bank crashes that have occurred and whether or not they are responsible for losing client’s funds.

“It weighs on us,” said Bob Gordon, a partner at Gordon & Donner in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

The ongoing question of whether lawyers should split up their client’s funds over $250,000 in various bank accounts all over town is popular and while a few say yes, there are others who say absolutely not.

“That would not be feasible,” said Gordon.

Still…Gordon adds, “At any given time, we have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in trust accounts, if not millions. It could be a nightmare if our bank failed.”

Although Gordon was assured that his bank was secure, you never know. “I doubt that anyone knew Wachovia had the problems it did.”

A partner in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla. office of Gunster Yoakley, Martin Press, said, “Our firm has made it a rule to deal with the big institutions. My view of the world is there are certain institutions that are too big to fail — the Bank of Americas, the Citibanks, the Chase Manhattans, the JP Morgan Chases.”

Regardless, as Lehman Brothers has proven…anything can happen.

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Financial institutions are being swallowed by the economic tidal wave. As they try to exit bankruptcy or find reorganizations, the lack of financing to assist them may lead to these five things, as researched by the National Law Journal:

1. Sudden, prenegotiated mergers or buyouts, similar to Lehman Brothers’ fate.

2. Increased asset liquidation, rather than traditional reorganizations.

3. Significant international costs related to layoffs of overseas employees, based on foreign severance protections.

4. As firms merge and restructure, a loss of in-house counsel jobs.

5. Significant changes in executive retention packages to reflect attitudes against large bonuses.

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As major financial corporations are crumbling down, multimillion-dollar companies seeking bankruptcy protection can’t secure funding. They are also losing pledged money to save their operations resulting in liquidations and thousands of job losses.

“It is not just the consumer that is running low on cash, but major financial institutions are running short on cash and are having trouble borrowing to cover their loan commitments,” said Peter J. Gurfein, a restructuring specialist in Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld’s Los Angeles office.

According to Gurfein, “the heart of the problem for companies trying to emerge from bankruptcy is lack of funding to pay for it, or withdrawal of previously committed funds.”

Filing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy means that the company has the ability to put off existing debts while attempting to raise capital and restructure their business in order to remain above water. However, as reported in The National Law Journal, “failure to keep up with payments in bankruptcy, or find money to exit as a viable business, may prompt what’s called a Section 363 liquidation sale, or even a conversion to a Chapter 7 liquidation for the sale of assets.”

“A lack of funding to assist troubled businesses through a tough economy is widespread,” said Victor G. Milione, head of the restructuring practice in the Boston office of Nixon Peabody. “We’re seeing it across all segments of the revenue stream for our clients as well as companies not our clients, from midcap to large-capital companies and those publicly traded.”

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The demise of Wall Street’s top players has been a major gain for some law firms. As they say, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Hughes Hubbard & Reed has its 12 bankruptcy lawyers busy, busy, busy handling the mess after the meltdown. The firm has boomed the practice group by two-thirds with the timely acquisition of a bankruptcy creditors’ rights and finance boutique, Luskin, Stern & Eisler.

Joining Hughes Hubbard are partners Nathan Eisler, Michael Luskin, and Richard Stern. And the main cause behind all the big changes came after the Lehan Brothers empire came crumbling down.

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Wall Street continues to be the hot topic of the week as lawsuit buzz is flying high. However, plaintiffs who have filed shareholder lawsuits against the most prominent financial firms may come to a halt indefinitely. Companies such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the $85 billion loan to American International Group Inc. and the bailout of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), have put a temporary freeze on the dozens of shareholder lawsuits filed against them.

Securities fraud and breach of fiduciary duties are the drive behind suits against the big guns who went off for the last time. However, many defense attorneys anticipate that “plaintiffs could have a difficult time blaming specific companies and their individual directors and officers for what could be interpreted as uncontrollable economic forces that caused the unprecedented collapse of so many firms.” Attorneys also warn that shareholder suits going up against Enron Corp. will face the most difficult time.

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For many companies, their intellectual property - such as processes, customer lists, trademarks, copyrights, or patents - may be their most valuable asset. In instances of a sale or liquidation of a company, a valuation of this intellectual property must take place. This valuation process complex, since intellectual property is intangible, and its value will change over time (typically downward).

There are three primary ways to arrive at the value of intellectual property: Cost, Market, and Discounted Cash Flow.

• Cost - This method asks what it would cost someone else to duplicate the intellectual property if they had to start from scratch. What people would they have to hire? What equipment would they have to rent or buy? What research would they have to perform? What information would they have to gather?

• Market - This method looks at other transfers of similar property for which the price is known and makes adjustments to determine what this property is worth. This method would yield accurate results if you really could apply it, because you would be (presumably) evaluating arm’s length transactions involving well-informed buyers spending real money and well-informed sellers actually giving up their hard-won assets.
• Capitalization of cash flows - This method looks at all the benefits of owning the intellectual property and discounts them to present value. Although it’s the most complex, it’s also probably the most accurate and the most ascertainable. This approach considers all the benefits of owning the intellectual property and considers all the possible uses for the property.

These three approaches are often used in valuing Intellectual Property. Upon liquidation, the bankruptcy trustee will be the one to decide which valuation to use.

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