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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

TURBULENT '22 - Inflation. Recession. War. Interest rate hikes. Suffice to say law firms played 2022 on "hard mode." Still, as Law.com's Patrick Smith reports, for many firms, especially those that saw just slight declines in revenue, 2022 was their second-best year ever, after 2021. Sounds crazy, right? But the newly released 2023 Am Law 100 data bears that out. Of course, a number of other firms that reached milestones in fiscal 2021 took a step back in 2022. Wachtell, LIpton Rosen & Katz, for example, became the firm to cross the $8 million mark in PEP in FY2021. The firm walked that back in 2022, however. Davis, Polk & Wardwell and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, meanwhile, both crossed the $7 million mark in PEP in FY2021. Now both sit at under $6 million after dropping 20.83% and 7.09%, respectively.

VALUE AD? - Do personal injury lawyer advertisements lead to bigger recoveries for plaintiffs? As Law.com's Charles Toutant reports, the defense bar and insurance companies think so. They use the term "social inflation" to describe a pattern of longer trials and larger verdicts and settlements that are not supported by a legal or factual basis. Robert Tyson, a defense attorney at Tyson & Mendes in San Diego, said he believes ads touting plaintiffs firms' major recoveries serve to desensitize potential jurors to the idea of awarding large sums. A lawyer who obtains a hefty recovery is "able to advertise it as plaintiffs lawyers, in order for it to get published in newspaper articles and for the general public who sits on the jury to get numb to it, right? Like, what's the value of a life now? $10 million? You don't blink at that anymore," Tyson said.

ON THE RADAR - Certain executives and board members at biotechnology company Novavax Inc. were hit with a shareholder derivative lawsuit April 17 in Maryland Circuit Court for Montgomery County. According to the complaint, Novavax received a flush of public funding in 2020 to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, causing share prices to leap from $4 in early 2020 to $104 in July of the same year. The complaint accuses the defendants of concealing problems with vaccine production and compliance that ultimately lost the company its opportunity to market its COVID-19 vaccine. The lawsuit further alleges that the defendants unloaded $87 million in Novavax shares while keeping shareholders in the dark. Zuckerman Spaeder and Morris Kandinov LLP filed the lawsuit on behalf of Jared Needelman, a Novavax shareholder. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendants. The case is C-15-CV-23-001550, Needelman v. Erck. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar.

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