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Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

After working at Theranos Inc. for eight months, Tyler Shultz decided he had seen enough. On April 11, 2014, he emailed company founder Elizabeth Holmes to complain that Theranos had doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks. The reply was withering. Ms. Holmes forwarded the email to Theranos President Sunny Balwani, who belittled Mr. Shultz’s grasp of basic mathematics and his knowledge of laboratory science, and then took a swipe at his relationship with George Shultz, the former secretary of state and a Theranos director. “The only reason I have taken so much time away from work to address this...

Embattled Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is a victim who has been "totally attacked," venture capitalist Tim Draper told CNBC on Tuesday. Holmes has been under fire since a series of reports by The Wall Street Journal suggested the blood-testing start-up's testing devices were flawed. "Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of maybe why the women are so frustrated. She is a woman entrepreneur who built a fabulous company, did great things for consumers and she got attacked," the founding partner of Draper Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson said in an interview with "Closing Bell." "This is a great entrepreneur who...

Theranos Inc. allegedly voided 11.3% of all blood-test reports that the Silicon Valley laboratory firm provided to customers of Walgreens stores through a yearslong partnership between the two companies, according to legal papers the drugstore chain filed Tuesday. Theranos, whose main lab failed an inspection by U.S. regulators earlier this year, told Walgreens in June that it subsequently voided 31,000 test reports provided to the chain’s customers, Walgreens said in the public version of a sealed lawsuit.

SAN FRANCISCO – Walgreens has filed a $140 million breach of contract suit against Theranos Inc., compounding the woes of the Silicon Valley-based medical device startup. The suit was filed under seal in Delaware federal court on Tuesday. It's not clear what exactly the Illinois-headquartered pharmacy chain is alleging, but the docket describes the case as a breach of contract suit with a demand of $140 million.

CHARLOTTESVILLE — A federal court jury decided Friday that a Rolling Stone journalist defamed a former University of Virginia associate dean in a 2014 magazine article about sexual assault on campus that included a debunked account of a fraternity gang rape. The 10 member jury concluded that the Rolling Stone reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was responsible for defamation, with actual malice, in the case brought by Nicole Eramo, a U-Va. administrator who oversaw sexual violence cases at the time of the article’s publication. The jury also found the magazine and its publisher responsible for defaming Eramo. The $7.5 million lawsuit...

Federal court to Obama: Sorry, champ, you can't spend money on ObamaCare if Congress didn't allocate it It seemed an astoundly obvious case. The power of the purse belongs to Congress, and the executive branch can’t just spend money if Congress never passed a bill allocating the money. But ths is the presidency of Barack Obama, where things like the Constitution and balances of power are mere puzzles to be solved by a power-crazed executive. Remember, this is the guy who regularly declares, “If Congress won’t act, I will!” No, champ. If Congress won’t act, you can’t. That’s how the...

Retail giant Walmart won a legal victory Monday in a fight over taxation by Puerto Rico’s government. A federal judge in the U.S. island territory ruled that a modified tangible-property tax is invalid. The ruling was issued as Puerto Rico’s government rushes to find new sources of revenue and a debt restructuring mechanism from the U.S. Congress while struggling through a decade-long economic crisis. Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla said his government will appeal the decision. “The judge just took away $100 million from the people of Puerto Rico and gave it to Walmart,” he said, referring to the revenue the...

FULL TITLE - Federal court deals blow to gun reformers saying people have 'fundamental right' to own assault weapons in rejection of Maryland law A federal court said that assault weapons are in such "common use" that owning them is a "fundamental right" in a decision that could force the Supreme Court to rule on whether the firearms are legal. On Thursday, a three-judge federal panel dealt a blow to anti-gun violence advocates when they rejected portions of a Maryland gun reform law. The legislation was passed following the Sandy Hook massacre which claimed the lives of 20 children and...

In a major victory for gun rights advocates, a federal appeals court on Thursday sided with a broad coalition of gun owners, businesses and organizations that challenged the constitutionality of a Maryland ban on assault weapons and other laws aimed at curbing gun violence. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said the state's prohibition on what the court called "the vast majority of semi-automatic rifles commonly kept by several million American citizens" amounted to a violation of their rights under the Constitution. "In our view, Maryland law implicates the core protection of the...

Besides doing something about certain lawless decisions made by our black-robed masters, something must also be done about how we came to such a place where they can cast their gaze across the fruited plain and whatever catches their fancy becomes the law of the land, indeed higher than the Constitution. Roe was bad enough, a joke of a decision made out of whole cloth after Justice Blackmun consulted with phony history and the opinion of his young daughter. But Obergefell is much worse, coming as it does after twenty years of everyday Americans making their views abundantly and overwhelmingly...

Canada’s government has lost an attempt to ban the practice of wearing face veils while swearing the oath of citizenship. Zunera Ishaq is a 29-year-old woman with devout Muslim beliefs. She came to Canada from Pakistan in 2008 and refused to take part in a citizenship ceremony because she would have to remove her niqab. Prime Minister Stephen Harper government’s rule banning face coverings at such ceremonies was earlier found unlawful by the Federal Court. …

It’s an odd world in which judges are accused of usurping the role of Congress for ruling that the executive branch must follow the text of a law Congress wrote. But that’s what has happened today. In Halbig v. Burwell, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Congress never gave the federal government power to provide subsidies and assess penalties under the Affordable Care Act in states that haven’t established their own health-insurance exchanges. President Obama and the Congress that passed the law assumed this wouldn’t be a problem: States were expected to go along and establish their own...

Jonathan Tamari POSTED: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2014, 10:57 AM WASHINGTON -- President Obama will nominate Cheryl Anne Krause, a partner at the Philadelphia office of law firm Dechert LLP, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the third circuit, the White House said. Krause will be nominated today to a seat on the federal appeals court that serves Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands. "Cheryl Ann Krause has displayed exceptional dedication to the legal profession through her work and I am honored to nominate her," Obama said in a news release.

A federal court tonight has thrown out a case brought by the family of Brian Terry, the Border Patrol agent who was killed in a firefight on the Arizona-Mexico border in December 2010. Sharyl Attkisson reports that money already awarded to the family precludes this sort of case from proceeding.

A federal court should not permit five leading Internet companies to reveal how often they are ordered to turn over information about their customers in national security investigations, the government argued in papers released Wednesday. In a filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the government said that allowing the companies to release such detailed information “would be invaluable to our adversaries,” providing a clear picture of where the government’s surveillance efforts are directed and how its surveillance activities change over time, the court papers stated. Companies seeking to release the information about the orders received are Google Inc., Microsoft...

A federal appeals court Tuesday declared unconstitutional a law allowing Americans born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace on their U.S. passports, the latest ruling in a case that stretches back a decade. … The case was brought by parents of an American boy named Menachem Zivotofsky, who was born in a Jerusalem hospital soon after the law was passed. The parents wanted to list Israel as his birthplace, but the U.S. has refused to recognize any nation's sovereignty over Jerusalem since Israel’s creation in 1948—so the boy’s U.S. passport only says “Jerusalem” as his birthplace. The Bush...