Just last month we wrote about our surprise at Merck’s dismissing Cravath for the Supreme Court part of some Vioxx litigation. The pharma giant went with Williams & Connolly after Cravath’s Evan Chesler lost at the Third Circuit.
Imagine our shock when we read that Wachtell has been kicked to the curb! And there isn’t even any spin that the client is changing teams for an appeal.
The details after the jump.
The client is Indian IT consultant/outsourcing vendor Satyam Computer Services, which earlier this year announced some massive accounting fraud by its CEO. Ironically, “Satyam” translates from Sanskrit as “truth.”
AmLaw Daily has the story:
Back in February, Satyam’s board announced that it had hired Wachtell to defend the company shortly after its founder, Ramalinga Raju, stunned the Indian business community by admitting he falsified the company’s accounts for years, creating a fictional cash balance of around $1 billion.
On Friday, Jones Day partner Jayant Tambe filed with the court a “consent to substitution of counsel,” asking Manhattan federal district court judge Barbara Jones to allow Jones Day to step in for Wachtell on the shareholder litigation.
Tambe (Toronto BA ‘89, Notre Dame JD ‘92) seems an unlikely choice, his expertise is primarily in financial-products litigation and he is co-leader of Jones Day’s Financial Institutions Litigation & Regulation Practice. Tambe speaks Hindi, so Satyam may have wanted someone more familiar, culturally. Tambe was way out ahead on the looming subprime-disclosure litigation; the NY Times quoted him in January 2008 on the issue.
The Wachtell lawyers consenting to the substitution are litigation partners Warren R. Stern (Columbia BA ‘74, Harvard JD ‘78) and George T. Conway, III (Harvard AB ‘84, Yale JD ‘87), and associate Michael Stephen Winograd (Lafayette BA ‘92, Penn JD ‘00).
The corporate defendants have rounded up a nice selection of New York firms: Stanley Parzen of Mayer Brown; Fraser Hunter of WilmerHale; Irwin Warren of Weil Gotshal; and Jeff Jacobson of Debevoise; plus Gordon Atkinson of Cooley Godward’s San Francisco office.
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