Bank of America Corp.

Ruden McClosky has lost two equity partners, leaving the firm below the 40 equity partners required by its bank line of credit, according to sources.

As the two-year anniversary of Washington Mutual’s bankruptcy filing approaches, Brown Rudnick has tossed up a new roadblock to WaMu’s plans to emerge from Chapter 11. The firm, representing a bundle of securities holders, filed a complaint Wednesday accusing WaMu, buyer JPMorgan Chase and the federal government of colluding to deceive and then deprive a group of securities holders who purchased about $4 billion in WaMu securities years before the bank’s demise.

Although a Texas bankruptcy court had the authority to certify a class action against Wells Fargo, it stumbled in doing so. The 5th Ciruit found that the lower court had jurisdiction to certify a class of about 1,200 individuals who had filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy and had mortgages held or serviced by the bank — but the appeals court found that the questions of law and facts raised by the putative class members were not similar enough to warrant certification.

Finding inadequate a law firm’s efforts to isolate a newly hired partner from a potential conflict, a New York state judge has said he will “reluctantly” disqualify the litigation boutique from representing a client in an arbitration against former Lehman Brothers Holdings employees. After the arbitration proceedings had been brought before the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Kobre & Kim hired a former federal prosecutor who had been involved in a criminal probe of the bank’s sale of auction-rate securities.