Alison Frankel

My colleague Karen Freifeld was in Manhattan State Supreme Court Thursday when Bank of America counsel Theodore Mirvis of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz stood up to argue for the dismissal of Walnut Place’s suit demanding millions of dollars in put-backs in two Countrywide mortgage-backed securities trusts. Everyone who follows MBS litigation knows that Walnut, represented by Grais & Ellsworth, is the leading objector to BofA’s embattled $8.5 billion settlement with Countrywide MBS investors. But Freifeld was the first journalist to pick up Mirvis’s big disclosure: Walnut Place, he told Justice Barbara Kapnick, is actually the distressed debt hedge fund Baupost.

Late Friday, Baupost informed its partners (as the fund calls clients) that it is indeed Walnut Place. But according to a source who disclosed the memo’s content to Reuters, the hedge fund said it is litigating to protect its clients’ investment — and not, as a blog suggested Thursday night, because it has shorted Bank of America stock.

“From time to time and for a variety of reasons [Baupost] forms legal entities to consolidate investments. Walnut Place is such an example,” the Baupost memo said. “It holds certain of our residential mortgage-backed securities investments. Walnut Place has initiated legal actions against the originator of the loans underlying those securities because we believe there have been egregious deficiencies in the underwriting of mortgages. That litigation is intended to protect the interests of our investors and is ongoing.”

The hedge-fund blog Zero Hedge speculated Thursday night that Baupost, as Walnut Place, may be fighting the proposed BofA MBS settlement because it has shorted Bank of America stock and taken a long position on MBIA, which is also engaged in do-or-die MBS litigation with BofA. The Baupost client memo — without naming the Zero Hedge blog — firmly rejected that assertion as “unfounded and completely false.”

“We have on occasion owned a small amount of default protection on Bank of America debt as part of our overall portfolio hedging strategy through which we hold credit default swaps on a diverse group of financial institutions and other corporate issuers,” the memo said. “We currently have no long or short position in equity, corporate debt, or credit default swaps of Bank of America or MBIA.”

The Justice Department’s case seeking to block AT&T’s $39 billion acquisition of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile is rocketing toward a Feb. 13 trial date. AT&T has everything riding on either a win at trial or a settlement that satisfies DOJ’s concerns about the combined entity’s dominance in nationwide wireless markets; as On the Case has reported, AT&T withdrew its application for Federal Communications Commission approval of the merger after the FCC announced it wanted an administrative law judge to consider the agency’s problems with the proposed deal. AT&T and T-Mobile are apparently betting that they’ll be able to come back to the FCC with a stronger case after they’ve appeased (or vanquished) the Justice Department.

But there’s another potential roadblock. Sprint Nextel Corporation and two regional wireless companies have also filed a suit to bar the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. At a hearing Friday in Washington, D.C., federal court, U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle will consider two very different scenarios for when Sprint’s case should be heard. Her answer will determine whether Sprint and its lawyers at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom will get a shot at stopping the deal.

AT&T, represented by Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel and Haynes and Boone, said as recently as Wednesday that it fully intends to complete the merger, although the company’s CFO declined to answer reporters’ questions about talks with the Justice Department. Meanwhile, the special master overseeing discovery in the DOJ suit indicated in a ruling Wednesday that AT&T’s withdrawal of its FCC application won’t affect the pretrial process. (The Justice Department had taken the opportunity of a third party’s bid to quash an AT&T subpoena to ask AT&T about its intentions; AT&T, according to the ruling, “responds that the recent events with the FCC proceeding have not altered the posture or timelines in the instant case.”)

Late Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones of Manhattan federal court denied Bank of America’s motion to disqualify Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan from representing AIG in its $10 billion mortgage-backed securities case against BofA, Merrill, and other bank subsidiaries. BofA’s lawyers at Munger, Tolles & Olson had argued that a former Munger partner, Marc Becker, acquired confidential information about Merrill’s MBS litigation strategy before departing to join Quinn Emanuel in 2008, then proceeded to work on AIG’s case against BofA and Merrill. The judge faulted Quinn’s screening process for failing to identify Becker’s potential conflict. But she said Becker had performed only non-substantive editorial work on AIG’s complaint and remand motion, didn’t share any confidences, and took steps to segregate himself from the AIG case as soon as he was reminded of his previous work for Merrill Lynch and its former mortgage unit. “There is no meaningful showing here that the trial process will be tainted,” Jones wrote. “The court finds that it would be unduly prejudicial to disqualify Quinn.”

But what about Marc Becker?

In October, after learning that Munger Tolles had raised the issue of his previous work for Merrill Lynch and First Franklin Financial, Becker resigned from Quinn Emanuel’s London office. In a Nov. 3 declaration, Becker said that he hadn’t remembered working for First Franklin when he spent a total of 5.8 hours reviewing the two AIG documents. “Had I remembered it, I never would have had anything to do with the [BofA] action,” he wrote. “None of what I did during those 5.8 hours on the [BofA] action was in any way focused on, or specific to, First Franklin or Merrill Lynch. I did not use or disclose any confidential information of First Franklin or Merrill Lynch. In fact, I did not at that time, and do not now, recall any confidential information of First Franklin or Merrill Lynch.” Becker asserted that Munger’s account of his work for Merrill — which cast him as a lead partner in Merrill and First Franklin’s MBS defense strategizing — didn’t jibe with his refreshed recollection of a “far more limited” role.

Becker remained at Quinn Emanuel for a month after Munger first alerted the firm of his potential conflict. During that time, according to his declaration, he met with Quinn’s outside counsel, Gregory Joseph, to discuss his work for Merrill, without any Quinn partners present. “Thus, even if I had recalled any confidential information regarding Merrill Lynch or First Franklin, which I did not, Quinn Emanuel would not have been exposed to it,” he wrote. “I understand that defendants have suggested that I was aware of and deliberately ignored the existence of a conflict of interest arising from my work on the First Franklin matter. That is totally untrue.”

A filing late Monday confirmed what I reported last month: Merrill Lynch has agreed to a $315 million settlement of a securities class action stemming from 18 Merrill mortgage-backed note offerings. This agreement is the fourth MBS securities settlement, following this summer’s landmark $125 million Wells Fargo class action deal and a pair of settlements with Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, totaling $165.5 million, that National Credit Union Agency reached in November. The Merrill agreement, negotiated by lead class counsel at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, is by far the biggest score so far for MBS investors in a securities suit (as opposed to contract, or put-back, litigation).

There are dozens more MBS securities suits out there, as the Merrill settlement agreement acknowledges: the deal carves out claims by AIG, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and other MBS investors that have already filed their own securities suits against Merrill Lynch. But one of the big mysteries of the MBS securities litigation has been how to value the cases, since there’s so little precedent in the way of settlements. The NCUA deals helped; the credit-union regulator repackaged and resold mortgage-backed securities belonging to five failed credit unions, so the agency actually knew how much the credit unions lost through their MBS investments. In its talks with Citi and Deutsche Bank (which the agency didn’t formally sue), NCUA was able to claim specific, fact-based damages.

The Merrill settlement documents provide significantly more insight for plaintiffs who don’t have the luxury of U.S. government backing to sell repackaged mortgage-backed securities. The documents don’t disclose the class’s specific damages claim; the case settled before investors filed their damages expert’s report. But the exhibits included along with the settlement brief indicate a methodology for calculating damages that other plaintiffs can use. MBS defendants, including Merrill Lynch, will undoubtedly continue to assert that MBS noteholders shouldn’t recover anything for their securities claims because they’re sophisticated investors who knew the riskiness of mortgage-backed notes. But as hundred-million-dollar settlements pile up, that’s a tougher argument to sell.

The standard for U.S. judges to grant a preliminary injunction is notoriously high. Plaintiffs have to show that they’re likely to succeed on the merits; that they’ll suffer irreparable harm if the injunction isn’t granted; that the injunction is in the public interest; and that the balance of fairness supports awarding the bar. In patent cases, the analysis of likely success on the merits offers two outs for defendants: they can show that the plaintiffs’ patent probably isn’t valid or that they didn’t infringe it. In other words, there’s a long list of reasons for a judge to refuse to grant a preliminary injunction (which is one reason why so many patent holders also seek injunctions overseas).

In the most consequential injunction case of the moment — Apple’s attempt to bar sales of three Samsung smartphones and Samsung’s new Galaxy tablet — U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of San Jose federal court picked reasons from all over the no-injunction menu as she refused late Friday to grant the injunction. (Here’s the Reuters story from Dan Levine.) There’s no real theme running through Koh’s decision, which analyzes each asserted patent and each allegedly infringing product. That’s frustrating for anyone hoping to find a broader meaning for smartphone litigation in her ruling, but it gives Apple and Samsung a pretty clear indication of how they’re likely to fare as the merits case moves forward.

Apple asserted that two Samsung phones — the Galaxy 4G and Infuse 4G — infringe two Apple design patents. Based on the precedent established by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a case called Egyptian Goddess v. Swisa, Koh applied an “ordinary observer” test to evaluate infringement. She concluded that although it is “a close question,” an ordinary observer would likely find Samsung’s Galaxy and Infuse phones infringe Apple’s patent on a flat, black, rectangular smartphone with a translucent face. She found that under the Durling v. Spectrum Furniture test for obviousness, Samsung was likely to succeed in challenging one of Apple’s smartphone design patents as invalid — but she found Samsung had not raised substantial questions about the validity of the other patent.

You don’t have to look very hard for an explanation of why two industry trade groups hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to bring their suit to block the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from enforcing a new rule limiting commodity speculation through derivatives trading. In July, Scalia won a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that struck down the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Dodd-Frank-mandated rule requiring corporations to provide stockholders with access to proxy materials on shareholder-nominated board nominees. (The SEC subsequently announced it wouldn’t appeal the ruling.) Nor was the proxy-access victory Scalia’s first whack at federal agency rule-making: he’s managed to overturn two previous SEC rules (see here and here); mounted a landmark challenge to Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower protections; and won cases striking down a pair of laws requiring certain employers to provide employees with health benefits. For business groups that consider themselves overregulated, Scalia is the man to see.

The suit against the CFTC, filed by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or SIFMA, isn’t a surprise. The new rule, which sets strict limits on derivative contracts tied to 28 commodities, is supposed to curb speculation. The CFTC, which passed the rule by a 3-2 vote, took the position that Congress required the agency to enact the regulation in Dodd-Frank. But as Reuters has reported, banks and brokerages have fiercely opposed the rule since it was proposed. “Affected parties have been watching from the start,” said Scalia, who declined to specify when the trade groups hired Gibson to litigate.

Friday’s complaint asserts that the CFTC “grossly misinterpreted its authority,” arguing that Congress instructed the agency to set position limits only if the CFTC concluded they were necessary to control speculative trading. The trade groups alleged that the agency found no such evidence; even one of the commissioners who ultimately voted in favor of the new rule, according to the complaint, said at a public hearing that, “No one has presented this agency any reliable economic analysis to support either the contention that excessive speculation is affecting the market we regulate or that position limits will prevent the excessive speculation.”

In the run-up to the first trial of a corporation charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Lindsey Manufacturing and its lead counsel, Jan Handzlik, put up as vigorous a defense as you can imagine. Handzlik (then at GreenbergTraurig and now at Venable) worked with Janet Levine of Crowell & Moring (counsel for Steve Lee, Lindsey’s former CFO) to challenge the government’s conduct, its evidence, even its interpretation of the FCPA’s language. It was to no avail. In May, after a five-week trial and seven hours of deliberation, a Los Angeles federal jury convicted Lindsey Manufacturing, chairman and CEO Keith Lindsey, and CFO Lee on all counts. For Handzlik and Levine, who were convinced the prosecution’s allegations that their clients funneled bribes to officials of a Mexican state-owned electric company were meritless, the conviction was devastating.

So you can image their joy Thursday, when U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz in Los Angeles vacated the convictions and threw out the indictment against their clients. Matz dismissed the government’s case with prejudice, which means that unless the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturns his ruling, the Lindsey defendants cannot be recharged.

Matz based his decision on numerous examples of government misconduct, beginning with falsehoods in search-and-seizure warrant applications, extending to false and misleading grand jury testimony by an FBI agent, and compounded by prosecutors’ failure to turn over some of that testimony to the defense. Handzlik, Levine, and their teams had alerted the judge to much of the misconduct before the jury reached a verdict, but Matz said the magnitude of the government’s behavior became clear only in retrospect.

Last month, as U.S. banks began reporting their third-quarter financials, I noted that the banks had beefed up their disclosure of potential liability for mortgage-backed securities activity. Morgan Stanley revealed that it had received a demand letter from Gibbs & Bruns, the firm that represents the big funds that negotiated the proposed $8.5 billion MBS breach-of-contract settlement with Bank of America. Goldman upped its reported MBS exposure to $15.8 billion, from a mere $485 million in the second quarter. The new emphasis on disclosure, I said, was partly the result of more claims, but also partly due to pressure from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to improve MBS disclosures.

The bond insurers’ trade group, the Association of Financial Guaranty Insurers, has also been agitating for banks to acknowledge their MBS exposure — and particularly their exposure to MBS breach-of-contract (or put-back) claims. In September 2010 AFGI sent a blistering letter asserting that Bank of America’s MBS put-back liability to its members was more than $10 billion. This September the bond insurers targeted Credit Suisse, which, according to AFGI, had failed to account for billions in put-back claims.

Late Wednesday AFGI struck again. The recipient this time was UBS. According to the letter AFGI sent to UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti, the Swiss bank has reported a $93 million reserve for put-back claims in its most recent financial report — even though it has received more than $800 million in put-back claims from just one bond insurer, and that insurer (presumably Assured Guaranty) has indicated its intention of demanding a total of $4 billion in put-backs from UBS.

On Tuesday, as you probably heard, Facebook reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission to resolve allegations that it deceived users about how it used their personal information. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said publicly that “we made a bunch of mistakes.” But you won’t find any such admission in Facebook’s proposed settlement agreement with the FTC. In that document, Facebook “expressly denies the allegations set forth in the [FTC] complaint.”

There’s a similar denial of wrongdoing from Merck, which last week reached a $950 million resolution of the Justice Department’s civil and criminal allegations that it falsely marketed the painkiller Vioxx. Even though Merck pled guilty to a misdemeanor violation for off-label marketing and agreed to pay a $322 million criminal penalty, the company said it wasn’t admitting liability or wrongdoing in the civil portion of the DOJ settlement, for which it agreed to pony up $628 million.

Over at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, meanwhile, regulators obtained a $24 million settlement in early November with a North Carolina company called Queen Shoals. But if you check out the Queen Shoals consent order entered by a North Carolina federal judge, you’ll see that the defendants “neither admit nor deny” the CFTC’s allegations. And in the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation’s most recently disclosed enforcement agreement, an October 20 settlement with the First Community Bank of Santa Rosa, Calif., the bank resolved allegations “without admitting or denying any [FDIC] charges of unsafe or unsound banking practices.”

If there’s one federal jurist the Securities and Exchange Commission absolutely, positively did not want to see at the top of the docket in its $285 million settlement with Citigroup, it was Senior Judge Jed Rakoff of Manhattan federal court. Rakoff has been a festering sore for the agency since 2009, when he rejected a proposed $33 million settlement with Bank of America over failing to disclose bonus payments to Merrill Lynch executives in merger-related documents. In a March 2011 opinion in the Vitesse Semiconductor case, Rakoff took the agency to task for agreeing to settlements in which defendants neither admit nor deny wrongdoing. Then in July he claimed jurisdiction over the SEC’s case against former Goldman Sachs director Rajit Gupta, accusing the agency of forum shopping in filing an administrative action against Gupta. You can only imagine the teeth-gnashing at the SEC when Rakoff was assigned the Citi case. After the SEC tried to argue that Rakoff doesn’t have the power to consider the public interest in his evaluation of the proposed settlement, Monday’s rejection of the settlement was practically a foregone conclusion.

So you may be wondering — as I was — how it is that Rakoff ended up with the Citi case. The answer, according to his chambers and Chief Judge Loretta Preska of the Southern District, is that the assignment was purely random. Yes, there are 41 federal district judges in the district, so the odds of any of them overseeing multiple, unrelated cases filed by the same plaintiff are long. But according to Preska and Rakoff’s chambers, that’s what happened here.

The SEC filed the Citigroup case in federal court in Manhattan, rather than Washington, D.C. (where it filed a $75 million settlement with Citi in 2010) because the new Citi case includes SEC charges against Brian Stoker, a Citi Global Markets employee who allegedly structured and marketed the CDO that’s at the bottom of the case. Unlike the two Citi employees in the 2010 case, Stoker refused to settle with the agency. So in anticipation of litigation with him, the agency filed the entire Citi case in New York.