WilmerHale announced last week it was relocating its administrative support base to a new campus in Dayton, Ohio, as it seeks to streamline internal business operations across its many offices.

When the business services center opens in September, it will house the majority of the firm's technical support, finance, document services, new business clearance and human resources staff. Firm officials expect the move will affect just over 100 employees who currently work in the firm's Boston, New York or Washington, D.C., offices.

"One of our goals was to try to have all of those functions located near each other rather than spread out among our three East Coast offices," said Co-Managing Partner William J. Perlstein.

In 2004, D.C.-based Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering merged with Boston-based Hale and Dorr to create the 1,100-attorney firm that is now called WilmerHale. The firm is jointly managed by two managing partners, one based in each of the firm's headquarters in Boston and the District. Perlstein said as the combined firm continued to grow, it made economic sense to streamline its support operations.

Goldman Sachs' legal headaches don't start and end with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Reports surfaced late Thursday that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Goldman and its employees, over whether it may have committed securities fraud in its mortgage trading operations.

A representative for the firm would not confirm reports of an inquiry, but said they were not surprised given the scrutiny the firm has endured in recent weeks, adding they would cooperate with any requests for information.

The latest legal action builds on the high-profile civil case brought against the company last month by the SEC, in which the agency charged the firm and one of its employees with defrauding investors in the sale of securities tied to subprime mortgages.

In many ways, the agency's case has become a game changer for Goldman. Not only has it tarnished the gilded reputation of Wall Street's top firm, it also exposed the company to series of new legal attacks across a number of fronts.

Since the SEC announcement, top German and British officials, including UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, have demanded investigations into the firm's dealings, opening the door to additional regulatory probes.

The court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from San Diego-area Boy Scouts who have traditionally leased Balboa Park camp space.

Federal judges have said the Scouts are a religious organization and the lease violated federal law that prohibits the government promotion of religion.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued San Diego and the Boy Scouts in August 2000 on behalf of a lesbian couple and an agnostic couple, each with scouting-age sons. They filed the lawsuit after the City Council voted to extend the group's 50-year lease for another 25 years.

The Boy Scouts say they have no theology and only hold the position that children should "do duty to God" to become productive citizens.

A former enforcement attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission was sentenced Friday to eight years in prison for his role in a a series of multimillion dollar pump-and-dump stock fraud schemes.

Dallas-based attorney Phillip Offill Jr., 51, was convicted by a jury earlier this year on 10 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy. He testified that he was acting within the law, but the jury rejected his defense, and so too did U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady.

"Your testimony ... was an affront to justice," O'Grady told Offill at Friday's sentencing hearing. "It was one of the biggest pack of lies I've ever heard."

Offill, who worked at the SEC for 15 years before taking a job at the Godwin Gruber law firm in Dallas, aided schemes that by conservative estimates cheated more than 1,500 investors out of at least $2.4 million. The fraudsters would pump up the value of dubious penny stocks and then sell the shares at inflated prices to unwitting buyers.

Eight other coconspirators have already been convicted and sentenced in a case that has been under investigation for more than three years. Most of the illegal transactions took place in 2004.

The eight-year term imposed on Offill was one of the most severe. Prosecutor Ed Power said the tougher sentence was deserved because Offill lied on the witness stand and because his status as a respected attorney helped provide cover for the fraud.

When the Howrey law firm called its incoming associates into a conference room last June to announce it was breaking from industry custom and changing the role of its entry-level attorneys, there was a fair amount of apprehension. After all, the news came at a time when the economic downturn was forcing other firms to cut salaries or tell associates to delay their start.

But the law firm's move now seems prescient.

"Howrey was a first-mover, not a fast follower, here. And now we're going to see some other firms" doing the same, said William D. Henderson, an Indiana University law professor who studies law firm economics.

Instead of wooing first- and second-year attorneys with ever-higher salaries, Howrey set up a two-year program it called First Tier that offered new attorneys reduced salaries in exchange for more training. First Tier was the final step in a progression toward changing how associates advance at the firm.

In 2001, Howrey replaced its typical summer associate program with a "boot camp" for aspiring litigators. In 2007, it announced it would eliminate "lock-step compensation," in which attorneys are promoted en masse based on graduation year, and replace it with a merit-based system -- a move the firm completed at the beginning of 2009.

The law firm that won Enron investors $7.2 billion in what was one of the largest class action suits in the history of securities law filed charges against Goldman Sachs on Monday.

Robbins Geller Rudman and Dowd filed the lawsuit in U.S. district court in Manhattan, aiming to recover investors' losses stemming from the fraud charges issued earlier this month by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The suit, which currently names investors Howard Sorkin, Ilene Richman and "all other similarly situated" as the plaintiffs, is seeking class-action status.

It charges Goldman Sachs, as well as C-suite members CEO Lloyd Blankfein, CFO David Viniar, and President and COO Gary Cohn, with deceiving investors about the bank's financial conditions.

The complaint alleges that by failing to disclose conflicts in the sale of ABACUS 2007-AC1 -- the now-famed financial portfolio at the center of the SEC's charges -- Goldman Sachs caused investors to purchase the stock at artificially inflated prices.

Bill Clinton says someone who hasn't been a judge should be considered for the Supreme Court. But scratch the idea of the ex-president or his wife as a justice.

Clinton suggested that President Barack Obama follow a model that Clinton used when he tried unsuccessfully to persuade then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to agree to be nominated to the high court.

Justice John Paul Stevens' recent decision to retire hands Obama a second chance to shape the court.

Clinton, who has not been a judge, said that at 63, told ABC's "This Week" that he's too old to be considered, much as he might enjoy serving on the Supreme Court. He said his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, also might have been interested in past years, but not now.

Bill Clinton, who also had two court vacancies during his first years in office, ended up nominating two federal appeals court judges, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Ginsburg was 60 and Breyer was in his early 50s.

The former president urged Obama to pick someone around 50 years old.

Obama's Democratic predecessor in the White House says Cuomo and Mitchell, who had been a judge before serving in the Senate, would have made good justices, but both turned him down. He said he hopes Obama takes a look at someone who hasn't been a judge.

Among those reported to be under consideration, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, 49, has never been a judge.