A newsletter by Reuters and Westlaw

By Diana Novak Jones, Mike Scarcella and Sara Merken

Good morning. Here’s a roundup of some of the big stories we are reading. Nate Raymond digs into the U.S. judiciary’s first annual report on workplace misconduct — read the findings. Plus, the DOJ wants a judge to force Google to to sell its Chrome browser; big bonuses are spreading at large law firms; and billionaire Gautam Adani was indicted on U.S. bribery charges. Let’s jump in.

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REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

The federal judiciary’s first annual report detailing steps it has taken to address allegations of workplace misconduct showed most complaints were lodged not against judges but against other court staff. A top judge said the data suggested a "middle management problem," our colleague Nate Raymond reports.

The Office of Judicial Integrity within the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts published the report. The release of an annual report was one of several reforms the judiciary adopted at the recommendation of a working group established in 2018 amid allegations of sexual harassment against some judges during the #MeToo movement.

Data in the report showed that only half of the 178 workplace misconduct claims that were initiated from 2021 to 2023 involved the courts themselves as employers, as opposed to probation offices or federal public defender offices. Only 14% of those claims concerned law clerks and other staff in a judge's chambers, said U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad, director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

That’s how many phone-hacking lawsuits Mirror Group Newspapers is facing in the U.K. from public figures including actors Kate Winslet, Sean Bean and Gillian Anderson, London's High Court heard at a hearing on Wednesday. MGN had accepted that some unlawful information gathering took place at its newspapers in the early 2000s. The publisher asked the court for a trial in late 2025 to decide whether a sample of the cases were brought too late.

A few weeks before his death on Nov. 2 at age 72 from liver failure, litigator Lawrence Robbins' first novel was published, a taut legal thriller that won praise from critics including The New York Times Book Review and People magazine. It’s a remarkable capstone to a career that included 20 U.S. Supreme Court arguments, along with co-founding litigation boutique Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck & Untereiner, Jenna Greene writes in her latest column.

—U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, at the sentencing hearing for former cryptocurrency executive Gary Wang, who unwittingly wrote the computer code that helped FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried steal about $8 billion from customers of the now-bankrupt exchange. Kaplan praised Wang's cooperation with prosecutors, noting that he learned of Bankman-Fried's fraud later than others in his former boss's orbit. Wang will serve three years of supervised release.