☀️ Good morning from The Legal File! Here is the rundown of today's top legal news:

🎓 California alternative lawyer licensing plan rejected by state high court

The bar exam will remain the only way for new attorneys to become licensed in California.

The Supreme Court of California on Oct. 10 rejected a proposed alternative pathway that would have enabled law school graduates to become licensed after spending four to six months working under the supervision of an experienced attorney and submitting an acceptable portfolio of legal work.

Obtaining a California law license through the Portfolio Bar Exam, which would have involved applicants working with actual clients, would have implicated an "array of ethical and practical problems," the court wrote in its order denying approval of the alternative.

The court also said the program would compromise "fairness, validity, and reliability as a measure of an applicant’s competence.” It noted that applicants placed with more skilled or more dedicated supervisors could establish better portfolios of work than counterparts with “less committed supervisors."

The State Bar of California's board of trustees endorsed the Portfolio Bar Exam in November, over the objections of many public commenters who said the program would reduce the requirements to become a lawyer and would erode public protections.

Proponents of alternative licensing programs say they can help bring legal services to underserved communities, address racial gaps in bar exam pass rates, lower costs for law graduates, and better gauge the real-world skills that lawyers need to succeed in practice.

"The court missed an opportunity to better protect the public and to improve attorney licensure," said Susan Smith Bakhshian, a Loyola Law School professor who helped develop the Portfolio Bar Exam.

California admitted 5,315 new lawyers in 2023, and had the state high court approved the program, it would have become the largest jurisdiction to adopt an alternative pathway to attorney licensure, in what has become a small but growing trend.

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⚖️ US judge to hear objections to Boeing plea deal in fatal crashes

U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, is set to hold a hearing to consider objections from relatives of people killed in two Boeing 737 MAX crashes to the U.S. planemaker's agreement to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud regulators.

O'Connor is slated to hear arguments from Boeing and federal prosecutors arguing he should accept the plea deal, and lawyers for the relatives urging him to reject it. The judge may decide on Friday whether to accept the plea deal or rule on it later.

O'Connor has fielded hundreds of pages of legal briefs from the parties over the past several weeks. The families of the 346 people who perished in the plane crashes, which occurred in 2018 and 2019, contend the plea agreement is a "sweetheart" deal that doesn't go far enough in holding Boeing or its executives accountable for the deaths of their loved ones.

The Justice Department has defended the agreement, saying prosecutors arrived at the plea agreement after an extensive investigation and a series of meetings with the families.

"Yet in the end," the prosecutors said in an August court filing, DOJ officials have "not found the one thing that underlies the families’ most passionate objections to the proposed resolution: evidence that could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Boeing’s fraud caused the deaths of their loved ones."

Boeing has agreed to pay up to a $487.2 million fine and spend at least $455 million on improving safety and compliance practices over three years of court-supervised probation as part of the plea deal. The agreement allows the judge to cut the fine in half by crediting Boeing for money it previously paid in the case.

Victims' relatives want Boeing and its executives charged with crimes holding them responsible for the deaths of their loved ones and any evidence of wrongdoing presented in a public trial. They have also argued Boeing should have to pay up to $24.78 billion in connection with the crashes.

Judge O'Connor, considered one of the most conservative judges in the country, has previously expressed strong sympathy for the families and called the Boeing case "the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history."

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💲J&J talc bankruptcy stays in Texas despite 'forum-shopping' opposition

A Johnson & Johnson subsidiary can pursue its third attempt to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging its talc products caused cancer in a federal bankruptcy court in Texas, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez ruled on Oct. 10, allowing the company to avoid a venue that shot down its two previous efforts.

Lopez rejected arguments raised by the Department of Justice's Office of the U.S. Trustee, its bankruptcy watchdog, and attorneys representing some of the women suing the company who are opposed to the settlement.

They had argued that the case should be sent to a U.S. bankruptcy court in New Jersey, which oversaw and dismissed two previous bankruptcies meant to resolve the same talc lawsuits. But Lopez said J&J's latest effort should be treated as a new case, in part because J&J gathered votes in advance from claimants who support the settlement.

J&J subsidiary Red River Talc filed for bankruptcy protection in Houston in September, seeking to take advantage of bankruptcy courts' ability to enforce global settlements that permanently halt all related lawsuits and forbid new ones. It proposed a $9 billion settlement to resolve claims by women who allege that they developed gynecological cancers after using J&J talc products.

Law firms opposed to the settlement pointed out that J&J's "forum shopping" has now led to three bankruptcies filed in three courts since 2021.

"If that isn't abusive forum shopping, I don't know what is," attorney Sunni Beville told Lopez.

New Jersey-headquartered J&J faces lawsuits from more than 62,000 plaintiffs alleging its baby powder and other talc products were contaminated with asbestos and caused ovarian and other cancers. The company has said its products do not contain asbestos and do not cause cancer.

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💼 Judge slashes $185 mln award for law firm Quinn Emanuel in US healthcare case

A U.S. judge in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10 cut in half a $185 million legal fee payout for Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, awarding the law firm $92.4 million for its work on a multibillion-dollar federal healthcare insurance case.

Judge Kathryn Davis of the U.S. Federal Claims Court said the reduced amount was a reasonable reward for the business litigation firm.

Quinn was awarded $185 million for its work on the case in 2021, but a federal appeals court last year struck down the award as excessive and ordered Davis to reconsider it.

Davis on Oct. 10 found the 900-lawyer firm's hours were "improperly inflated and must be reduced."

Quinn Emanuel had urged the judge at a hearing in July to again approve the firm’s $185 million fee. A group of health insurers led by UnitedHealthcare and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan opposed the fee amount, calling it “astronomical.”

In the underlying case, Quinn Emanuel secured a $3.7 billion judgment in 2020 for a class of insurers that said the Obama administration failed to meet its obligations under an Obamacare provision aimed at encouraging medical coverage to uninsured Americans.

The $185 million fee amounted to 5% of the judgment fund. Quinn Emanuel had defended the award as justified based on the novelty of the case and the risk the firm took in pursuing the litigation. The firm said it had sunk about 10,000 hours into the litigation.

UnitedHealthcare and Kaiser told Davis that the request translated to more than $18,000 an hour for Quinn Emanuel. Top partners at the Los Angeles-founded firm often bill between $1,500 and $2,000 an hour, court records show.

The new fee award amounts to 2.5% of the judgment fund, Davis wrote. She credited the firm for developing what she said was "the novel, winning legal theory" underpinning the litigation.

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👋 That's all for today, thank you for reading The Legal File and have a great weekend!

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