Apparently the DOJ wants to make sure that you can get your Justin Bieber fix somewhere other than iTunes on New Music Tuesday.  Not too much detail out there on this one, but we’re keeping our collective ear to the ground.  There has to be more to this than just exclusivity in debuting new songs, right?

From Engadget:

It’s all just noise right now, but the United States Justice Department is purportedly having a “very preliminary conversation” with Apple regarding the company’s music business, wondering in particular if anything it’s doing (or has done) would violate antitrust legislation. According to unnamed sources familiar with the situation, DoJ staff seem most interested in whether or not Apple’s dominance in the market enabled it to unfairly prevent Amazon’s music service from exclusively debuting new songs.

Engadget – DoJ making preliminary inquiries into Apple’s music endeavors while iTunes dominance continues

From The Consumerist:

More than 100 lawyers from all around the country packed into a San Diego courtroom yesterday in an attempt to stake their claim to the lion’s share of any settlements that come from the multitude of federal lawsuits filed against Toyota in recent weeks.

Since Toyota announced the recall of more than 8 million vehicles, around 140 lawsuits have been filed in federal courts. But as those suits become consolidated and streamlined, it becomes increasingly important — at least to the plaintiffs’ lawyers — just where those cases will be heard.

Attorneys based in whichever of the 19 judicial jurisdictions gets the case stand a better chance of being selected to lead the litigation, and therefore stand to earn some major money.

Thus, you get the zoo that appeared before the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation yesterday. To make things move along as quickly as possible, each district had to decide which attorney or attorneys would plead their case during the allotted two minutes before the panel.

It was a scene the Wall Street Journal likened to speed-dating

The Consumerist – Lawyers Begin Scrambling For Position In Toyota Lawsuits

Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to read the rest of this post, but I wanted to go ahead and post the teaser blurb>

From FDANews.com:

Devicemakers may face an increase in indictments as the Justice Department zeroes in on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations. Justice’s FCPA and healthcare fraud units are beginning to work together to investigate FCPA violations in the device and pharmaceutical industries, Lanny Breuer, Justice assistant attorney general, said at the Pharmaceutical Regulatory and Compliance Congress. He noted that Justice is working more closely with the SEC, and international cooperation and information sharing is increasing as well…

I have been following this same argument conversation on the litsupport listserv as well, but I thought Tom O’Connor has summed it up pretty well in the following post:

There has been a fascinating thread on the Lit Support ListServ this week that was started by the following post.  “Why is EDD and Data Processing So Expensive, why can’t IT or my secretary do this ? I know that we have all been faced with this so I am wondering if anyone  can point me to a few good references, as I want to write a document that the average person can read and understand. This will help from having to explain this 300 times a year…” 

From Bloomberg:

Exxon Mobil Corp.’s (XOM) planned buyout of independent natural gas producer XTO Energy Inc. (XTO) provided a ringing endorsement for the commodity on Monday–and could signal a modest uptick in merger activity.

The deal is valued at $41 billion, including the assumption by Exxon of about $10 billion of XTO’s debt, and is the largest energy transaction since Chevron Corp. (CVX) acquired Texaco in 2001. It underscores the increasing attention major oil companies have been paying to unconventional resources–and is likely to stoke some of the mergers and acquisitions that until recently have been frozen by uncertainty about the future of natural gas prices.

“We should see a slow and steady increase in M&A activity,” said Stephen Davis, an associate portfolio manager for Alpine Mutual Funds…