Litigation involving MBIA has been keeping investors on edge for four years now, as the bond insurer wages war with the banks whose financial products it insured in the run-up to the economic crisis. It's also generated some wrenching reversals of fortune for the lead lawyers battling over MBIA's 2009 restructuring, which the banks say allowed the company to shirk its obligations to structured finance policyholders.

No doubt this is the biggest litigation assault on the banks to date. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which is the conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is seeking more than $190 billion total from the defendants. It claims they misrepresented the quality of loans bundled into residential mortgage-backed securities that were sold to Fannie and Freddie.

We've written plenty about companies protesting the legal bills of former executives in trouble with the law. The Sun-Times Mirror Group and McAfee are just a couple of examples. We've also explained why companies have such a hard time wriggling out of indemnification agreements that compel them to pay their executives' legal fees, even after those execs are convicted. But yesterday, The Recorder's Dan Levine broke a story about a case in which a D&O insurance carrier is refusing to pay the legal bills of a former biotech official under indictment--and he hasn't even gone to trial yet.

For weeks we've been itching to get a look at a letter that, according Gibson Dunn, will unmask Paul Ceglia and his claims to Facebook ownership as a fraud. Now, with sanctions requests against Ceglia and his lawyers already clogging the docket, another court deadline to produce the letter has come and gone.

Is that an indication that the banks' allegations of fraud in the insurer's $5 billion restructuring have hit a wall? Not hardly, says bank group lead counsel Sullivan & Cromwell, which is pushing forward with discovery against MBIA and the N.Y. insurance department.