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.

Attorney Dan Nabel considers an ethical problem: What do you do if you discover something potentially harmful to your case on the public portion of a client’s social networking page? Can you advise the client to change privacy settings to make that information invisible to the public?

A California appeals court has sided with Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy in a dispute over a novel contingency fee deal that called for more legal fees than the amount of money the client recovered. Upholding an arbitration award for the firm of $7.5 million, the court rejected arguments that the award — based on a contingency fee of 16 percent of the client’s estimated damages — was unconscionable

For three years, former Nixon Peabody associate Noah Doolittle had his eyes on a bonus for bringing in and servicing a client for the firm. The bonus, according to Doolittle, would be worth 5 percent of the $5.32 million in fees the law firm collected from the client in 2008. By his own account, Doolittle would be in line for a $266,000 bonus.

The list of defendants in a malpractice claim filed against defunct law firm Wolf Block reads like a who’s who of former Wolf Block lawyers who have moved on to other firms, retired or died since the client hired the firm more than 25 years ago. Alan H