A New Jersey lawyer who insisted he was bullied into filing a workers’ compensation petition has been censured for abandoning the case and not informing the client of his action. However, the lawyer’s claim that he was browbeaten may have spared him a suspension.

Since 2008, when a jury awarded Alcatel-Lucent a whopping $358 million on its infringement claims, Microsoft’s lawyers have systematically whittled away at their client’s damages. On Friday they did it again, when a San Diego federal judge slashed Alcatel-Lucent’s award to just $26.3 million.

When a client’s thwarting of discovery comes back to haunt his attorney, the lawyer may be tempted to save himself by pointing a finger at the client. However, that course of action would likely fail as a legal defense and could also constitute an ethics violation, writes Stroock & Stroock & Lavan’s Joel Cohen.

In a hearing in a defamation suit brought by a prominent legal malpractice attorney over a former client’s posts on complaintsboard.com, a judge was sympathetic to the client’s interest in publicizing his negative experience, but said he may have gone too far with his specific accusations.

Lawyers for Twitter have persuaded a jury that their client did not infringe a method patent for profiling celebrities. Patent lawyer Dinesh Agarwal had sued Twitter over a patent he was assigned in 2002 for a “Method and System for Creating an Interactive Virtual Community of Famous People.”