Dell Steps down as CEO of Dell

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Michael Dell, 40. announced that he will be stepping down later this year as CEO of Round Rock-based Dell, Inc. . Kevin Rollins, Mr. Dell’s longtime partner in running Dell Inc., will take over as CEO of the computer company in mid-July while Mr. Dell will remain chairman of the board. This new arrangement is similar to the one that Microsoft Corp adopted in 2000, when Bill Gates became chairman and chief software architect and Steve Ballmer took over as CEO. Mr. Dell founded Dell in May 1984 when he was a 19-year-old just finishing his freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin. When the company went public four years later, Mr. Dell kept the titles of chairman and CEO.

No Mens Rea?

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This NY Times article floats the proposition that Barry Bonds and other alleged customers of accused steroid dispensing BALCO were unwitting consumers of steroids.
H’mm.
Meanwhile, this Reason Online piece addresses the issues in the medical community regarding steroid use.

Justice accuses Jenkens & Gilchrist of participating in a fraud

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The NY Times reports here today that the Dallas-based law firm Jenkens & Gilchrist is the subject of a Justice Department motion in federal court that seeks to require the firm to disclose the identities of its clients who were sold abusive tax shelters. The government is contending that Jenkens & Gilchrist participated in fraud and should not be allowed to hide the identities of its tax-shelter clients from the Internal Revenue Service. The so-called crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege is most often applied to lawyers who represent organized-crime families and drug rings suspected of racketeering, not to tax lawyers suspected of civil or criminal tax fraud. The I.R.S. issued 25 summonses for the names of Jenkens & Gilchrist clients and other information, the firm refused to comply with any of the summons, and now the Justice Department is seeking an order to enforce the summons.

Eisner Overdrive

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As one would expect, the LA Times and the NY Times are all over the Walt Disney Company Board’s decision to remove Michael Eisner as chairman of Disney’s board, although he will remain as CEO for the time being. However, as usual, the Wall Street Journal‘s ($) coverage of the developments here, here and here is far superior.
What is ironic about this development is that it was spurred by Comcast‘s lowball takeover bid for Disney, which Mr. Eisner properly opposes and which has not gone well for Comcast (its stock price is down 10% since the takeover bid was announced). The bottom line is that the Disney board’s failure to develop a succession strategy for top management is coming back to haunt them at a critical time for Disney.

Heart developments in the The Medical Center

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The Texas Heart Institute and the DeBakey Heart Center in Houston’s Texas Medical Center are two of the best cardiovascular surgical care facilities in the world. Yesterday, the Texas Heart Institute announced that the 12th and only living recipient of an experimental, self-contained mechanical heart called the AbioCor replacement heart underwent surgery to implant the device on Feb. 20 at its facility in Houston. The recipient of the AbioCor replacement heart is in critical but stable condition. This is the fifth patient to receive the device at Texas Heart Institute under the care of Dr. O.H. Frazier, chief of cardiopulmonary transplantation and director of surgical research at the Texas Heart Institute and chief of transplant services at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. The AbioCor clinical trial began in July 2001.
In this related Chronicle article, several of Houston’s leading cardiologists discuss the merits of the increasingly popular “off-bump” heart bypass procedure in which the operation is done “off-pump” — i.e., without circulating the blood of the patient through a heart-lung machine. While some Houston doctors believe that the benefits of minimizing a patient’s recovery time are so great that they use the procedure almost exclusively, other surgeons are skeptical about the procedure’s ability to reduce the risk of stroke and other side effects.

Motion filed requesting that Garden Ridge Chapter 11 case be transferred to Houston

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Here is a motion filed recently in the Garden Ridge Corporation chapter 11 case that requests the Delaware bankruptcy court to transfer the case to Houston bankrupty court. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for March 17th. Although worth a shot, the motion will probably fail for the reasons discussed in this prior post. Houston attorney Kirk Kennedy filed the motion on behalf of his clients, the Fazio Family. Prior posts about Houston-based Garden Ridge are here, here and here.

Heads roll at Shell

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In a surprise to no one in the oil and gas industry, Royal Dutch/Shell Group‘s Board fired the company’s two top executives today in the wake of the company’s embarrassing announcement in January that it had significantly overestimated its oil and gas reserves.

Health care rationing

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As anyone who has ever had to oversee administration of an employer’s health insurance program knows, America’s health care finance system is in crisis. For those interested in the issues involved in this crisis, the Wall Street Journal ($) has put together a special health care finance section that includes links to a series of stories involving the issue of rationing in America’s health care system. The stories include: “Six Prescriptions to Ease Rationing”; “Universal Care Has a Big Price: Patients Wait”; “Longer Dialysis Raises Hopes, but Poses Dilemma”; “Stark Choices at a Texas Hospital”; “Lilly Fuels Debate Over Rationing”; “An Invisible Web of Gatekeepers”; “Health Care’s Big Secret: Rationing Is Here.” This is a great resource for reviewing the problems and issues confronting our health care finance system, and is worth the price of a WSJ subscription alone.
Along these lines, Jack over at TigerHawk posts this instructive blog entry regarding allocation of health care costs.

DA investigating Premiere Holdings

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The Harris County District Attorney‘s major fraud division announced in this story that it is conducting a criminal investigation into the demise of Houston-based Premiere Holdings of Texas, which promoted itself as a high-yield investment fund to prominent Houstonian investors but spiraled into bankuptcy over two years ago amid allegations of Ponzi scheme-type activity. One of the principal owners of Premiere is David Lapin, who is related to prominent Houston attorneys Jack Lapin (father) and Bobby Lapin (brother). Premiere promoted itself as a high-yield investment fund to mainly wealthy and conservative Houstonians. Indeed, Mike Richards, the former conservative talk show host on Houston conservative Christian radio station KSEV, used to promote Premiere as hot investment opportunity on his radio show. The Premiere case involves some of the best attorneys in Houston’s business litigation bar, so the D.A.’s investigation into Premiere could generate some interesting sparks. Stay tuned.

Primary races for state judgeships

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Texas’ system of judicial elections is not a good way to choose judges. For over 20 years, I have been supporting a new system for appointing judges in the Texas state courts similar to the appointment process that is used in the federal judicial system. That process has produced a superior federal judiciary.
Although a growing number of Texans agree that elections are not the best way to choose judges, the tendency in Texas politics is for the party in control of the statehouse to support the current system because most of the elected judges are from that party. Inasmuch as the Republicans are now solidly in control of Texas state government, the GOP state leaders are in no hurry to change a flawed system that nevertheless produces judges mainly from their party.
That is unfortunate. Virtually no Texas citizen knows all of the best candidates for the various judicial positions. For example, even though I have an active civil trial practice in both Harris and Montgomery Counties, I rely on the opinions of friends who practice criminal law to advise me regarding the best candidates for the criminal judgeships because I do not practice much in the criminal courts. Moreover, most lawyers are not trial lawyers, so even they have no experience on which to base an informed judgment about the best judicial candidates. Generally, lay people do not have the foggiest notion of who to select in Texas judicial races. Most folks simply look for a familiar name or two, sigh, and just make the best guess possible under the circumstances. Not exactly a sterling example of democracy at work.
As a result of the foregoing, family members, friends, and clients often ask me for my recommendation on the best candidates in the various state and county judicial races. Most of these races will be decided in the upcoming Republican Primary because of the paucity of Democratic Party candidates for these positions in the fall election. Accordingly, the following are my recommendations in the upcoming Republican Primary races:

Statewide:
Supreme Court of Texas, Place 5: Paul Green.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 2: Guy James Gray.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 5:Patricia Noble.
Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 6:Michael E. Keasler.
Harris County
14th Court of Appeals: Eva Guzman.
281st District Court: David Bernal.
334th District Court: Reece Rondon.
Appointed incumbents running for election for the first time, both of these judges are young and smart, and both possessed solid experience in private practice before taking the bench. We are fortunate to have young lawyers of this caliber on the bench.
177th Criminal District Court:: Adam Brown.
228th Criminal District Court: Clint Greenwood.
Montgomery County
1st Court of Appeals: Charles Kreger
410th District Court: Michael Mayes
This race is a good example of the flawed Texas judicial election system. Judge Mayes is a first rate trial judge, puts cases to trial, and thus promotes prompt resolution of cases in his court. Texas needs to be supporting good lawyers who are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to be a judge, not requiring them to incur the cost of a re-election campaign.

Early voting is going on right now, so get out and cast your vote!