Baker Botts associates are learning this week about potential changes to their pay and bonus packages that become effective Jan. 1, 2011, says Maria Boyce, partner-in-charge of the firm’s Houston office. The firm is moving associates from lockstep promotions and pay to a merit-based system, she says

The federal government’s efficiency in handling discrimination complaints by its own workers is slipping a bit, even as more minorities are landing federal jobs, according to an annual report on the federal work force, released this week by the U.S.

Bankruptcy attorneys for the Scott Rothstein estate have filed suit against the Republican Party of Florida, seeking the repayment of $237,000 in campaign contributions from the jailed former attorney. In a suit filed this week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fort Lauderdale, Berger Singerman, the law firm for trustee Herbert Stettin, alleges that the Florida GOP has refused to return more than 10 different donations made by Rothstein over a four-year period.

Former KB Home CEO Bruce Karatz could not have relied on advice about stock-options backdating from the company’s general counsel because he lied during an internal investigation into the practices, federal prosecutors argued in attempting to quash Karatz’s motion for a new trial. “Rather than establishing defendant’s good faith reliance on an attorney, the record readily establishes that defendant used [General Counsel Ben Hirst] to perpetrate a fraud,” prosecutors wrote in papers filed this week.

Former Special Counsel Scott Bloch faces up to six months in prison for withholding information from a House committee, but federal prosecutors said this week the government is not opposed to a sentence of probation. Bloch pleaded guilty in April to one count of criminal contempt of Congress for not disclosing the nature and extent of his instructions that a private company erase files from his government-issued computer and the computers of two other Office of Special Counsel employees.