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Lawyers looking to sue General Motors Co. after its global recall of 1.6 million vehicles over an ignition defect may find their path blocked by a judge’s order five years ago in the company’s reorganization, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Allegations about deaths or economic losses occurring before July 2009 were barred by a bankruptcy judge when he approved the sale of the automaker’s assets to the new GM. Attorneys are now examining pre-bankruptcy deaths and claims with a view to getting the ban lifted. Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Auto Safety, said that he would like GM to set up a fund as a sign of goodwill. Such a move may resolve claims that deaths and injuries were tied to the faulty ignition switches, a problem GM admitted it knew of more than a decade ago and failed to fix. By court order, the new GM can’t be held responsible for any product-related liabilities, such as wrongful death, personal injury or property damage, except those arising on or after July 10, 2009, when the new entity was born. Challenging GM’s immunity would require asking the judge who oversaw the historic U.S.-backed bankruptcy to reconsider his ban on claims. The time to revoke court orders dating from GM’s bankruptcy “has long past,” said Harvey Miller of Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP, the automaker’s bankruptcy lawyer. He said that the company’s creditors diligently examined its liabilities and potential exposure for possible damage suits.

The former chief executive of bankrupt online music storage firm MP3tunes was found liable yesterday for infringing copyrights for sound recordings, compositions and cover art owned by record companies and music publishers once part of EMI Group Ltd., Reuters reported yesterday. A federal jury in Manhattan found Michael Robertson, the former MP3tunes chief executive, and the defunct San Diego-based company liable on various claims that they infringed on copyrights associated with artists including The Beatles, Coldplay and David Bowie. The jurors also found MP3tunes was willfully blind to copyright infringement on its website, in what a lawyer for the recording companies suggested before the verdict would be the first ruling of its kind by a jury.

The collapse of the Jacoby & Meyers Bankruptcy LLP law firm, which was formed in 2012 by two consumer law giants, has mobilized some unpaid creditors to push for their final payments, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. LegalZoom.com Inc., which says it is owed about $1 million for leads it provided to Jacoby & Meyers Bankruptcy last fall, joined several other creditors to file an involuntary bankruptcy petition against Jacoby & Meyers Bankruptcy last week. The move is meant to pressure the assignee, Chicago financial professional Robert Handler, to investigate the firm’s former managers and to look other places for potential lawsuits that might win money — some of which could repay the firm’s bills. According to lawyers who are representing creditors, Handler said that the firm will pay what debts it could from its few remaining assets: contingency fees receivable, furniture and equipment. If the firm enters bankruptcy, their lawyers would be given more power to recover money, and it would provide more transparency and information for creditors, lawyers for creditors said in court papers.

Ford Motor Co. has filed a motion to unseal the records in the Garlock bankruptcy case, hoping to obtain evidence it needs to derail asbestos lawsuits against itself, Forbes.com reported yesterday. In a motion and accompanying memorandum of law filed with the federal bankruptcy court in Charlotte, N.C. late on Friday, Ford is seeking access to sealed testimony and exhibits that Bankruptcy Judge George R. Hodges relied upon to conclude that plaintiff lawyers had withheld evidence their clients had made conflicting statements about their asbestos exposure to different courts and bankruptcy trusts set up to pay claimants. In his January ruling slashing Garlock’s asbestos-related liabilities to $125 million, Judge Hodges cited the results of an examination of 15 plaintiff files which found that lawyers had withheld potentially important evidence of asbestos exposure from each of them. The judge stopped just short of calling the activity fraudulent, but said that the process “was infected by the manipulation of exposure evidence by plaintiffs and their lawyers.”

Quiznos’ proposed reorganization plan, filed in bankruptcy court on Friday provides for holders of claims under the company’s first-lien credit facility to receive pro rata shares of an amended $200 million first-lien credit facility and 100 percent of the reorganized company’s equity, subject to dilution, Forbes.com reported yesterday. The first-lien credit facility has $444.7 million outstanding, according to court filings. The amended $200 million term facility would have a five-year term, and carry interest at 15 percent for the first 18 months, in-kind, and 10 percent thereafter, in cash, according to a proposed term sheet filed with the bankruptcy court.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. thinks that Zachary Warren might hold the key to understanding the demise of law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf, the American Lawyer reported on Friday. Having left Dewey three years before its demise, in 2012, Warren must have found it odd when Vance’s office called to discuss the firm’s failure. Most people who once worked at the firm would have been surprised, too. They’d never heard of Warren until last week, when he was indicted, along with three more familiar Dewey names: Steven Davis, Stephen DiCarmine and Joel Sanders, the firm’s last chairman, executive director and chief financial officer, respectively. According to the allegations of the 106-count indictment, on or about December 30, 2008 — the end of the first full calendar year of operation following the blockbuster merger of Dewey Ballantine and LeBoeuf Lamb — Warren’s boss, chief financial officer Joel Sanders, allegedly told him that he would receive his full bonus “if the firm satisfied its bank covenants.” The indictment doesn’t say whether Warren knew what that phrase meant.

The Houston Astros have asked Bankruptcy Judge Marvin Isgur to return their civil lawsuit against Comcast, NBC Universal and former Astros owner Drayton McLane to state district court, where it originally was filed last November, the Houston Chronicle reported today. The request comes a week before Judge Isgur is scheduled to hold a long-delayed hearing in the lawsuit, an offshoot of the chapter 11 bankruptcy case involving the parent company of Comcast SportsNet Houston. Houston Baseball Partners, the corporate name for the investor group headed by Jim Crane, alleges that McLane, Comcast and NBC Universal conspired to commit fraud in conjunction with McLane’s sale of the Astros and their 46.5 percent share of Houston Regional Sports Network in 2011. Houston Regional Sports Network is the parent company of CSN Houston and is a partnership among the Astros, Rockets (31 percent ownership) and Comcast (22.5 percent). The McLane-Comcast lawsuit was moved to federal bankruptcy court at the request of Comcast in the wake of the involuntary chapter 11 bankruptcy petition filed by four Comcast affiliates. The Astros, however, argue that the case belongs in state court and that it was moved improperly.

Questions about the safety of its California lead-recycling operation continue to haunt Exide Technologies Inc., a battery maker operating under bankruptcy protection, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The company last week agreed to allow a $40 million lawsuit filed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District to move ahead in spite of the chapter 11 bankruptcy shield that protects companies from being targeted in litigation. The California agency, which regulates air quality in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, says that Exide's operation means an elevated risk of cancer for workers and residents in Vernon, Calif.

Three former top executives from the bankrupt U.S. law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf are expected to be hit with criminal charges today related to their alleged misleading of lawyers and banks about the firm's financial straits, Reuters reported today. Indictments are set to be unsealed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan against former Dewey Chairman Steven Davis, former Executive Director Stephen DiCarmine, and former Chief Financial Officer Joel Sanders. The Manhattan District Attorney has been investigating the executives since around April 2012, when a group of Dewey & LeBoeuf partners asked the prosecutor's office to examine "financial irregularities" at the firm. It could not be learned what the specific charges against the three are, though sources said that they involve felonies.

LightSquared Inc. said that it will ask a judge not to count a “no” vote on its bankruptcy reorganization plan cast by a fund controlled by Dish Network Corp. Chairman Charles Ergen, saying that the fund acted in bad faith, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The fund, SP Special Opportunities LLP, owns $1 billion of debt in LightSquared, the wireless broadband company controlled by Philip Falcone’s Harbinger Capital Partners LLC. LightSquared has accused Ergen of secretly accumulating the debt so he can buy the company’s airwaves for a below-market price through bankruptcy. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman on Feb. 24 approved the terms of a reorganization plan, which was then sent to creditors for a vote. The plan values LightSquared at $7.7 billion and doesn’t hinge on regulatory approval for airwaves that are its main asset. A denial of such approval pushed the company into bankruptcy in 2012.