Legal recruiting firm MS Legal Search has sued Serpe, Jones, Andrews, Callender & Bell of Houston to collect an unpaid placement fee after the firm allegedly hired a job candidate MS Legal referred to the firm. MS Legal seeks 20 percent or 25 percent of the attorney’s beginning annual compensation.

Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz has entered the Texas market by merging with Houston’s Spain Chambers. With its new Houston office, Baker Donelson has 17 offices in six states, plus Washington, D.C., and about 600 lawyers firmwide.

The D.C. Circuit has upheld as lawful a judge’s ruling that a Houston businessman must pay about $1 million for his role in a “pump-and-dump” scheme in which shares of an oil and gas exploration and production company were artificially inflated through thousands of false and misleading phone calls.

For the first time, the National Association for Law Placement has released to the public an index comparing new attorneys’ buying power in 70 cities. Despite higher salaries elsewhere, new lawyers in private practice in Dallas, Houston and Atlanta come out ahead due to differences in living costs.

A Houston man has filed a malpractice suit against lawyer Stewart W. Gagnon and his firm, Fulbright & Jaworski, alleging they failed to use “ordinary care” when representing him in a 2010 divorce and “engaged in a practice of excessive billing and over billing for tasks performed.”