The London-based law firm which pursued the action against oil trading giant Trafigura over the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast has claimed a record £105 million in costs.

The unprecedented figure, which Leigh Day & Co confirmed was correct, dwarfed the only known comparator - the BCCI litigation, Trafigura's QC Sean Wilken told the High Court. By contrast, he added, Trafigura's costs stood at £14 million.

Mr Wilken told Mr Justice MacDuff, who formally approved the confidential settlement of the largest ever group action last September, that if every claimant had been paid in full, that would amount to about £3 in costs for every £1 recovered. But he said that up to Easter, cheques had been cashed by 12,250 claimants - 41% of the total - and the process had stalled since the middle of March. He added that Leigh Day accepted that the costs were high.

Mr Wilken said: "In fact, we would say they are staggeringly high. I am told that this is one of the largest, if not the largest, costs claims in legal history.

"So we say this court is faced with groundbreaking claims of English lawyers in circumstances where the Ivorian claimants have not been paid in full the compensation which was supposedly the rationale of this litigation. Bluntly, we would like to know what happened to the money we paid to settle these claims."

It was later agreed between the two sides that issues raised should be dealt with by the senior High Court official who will assess costs at a further hearing at the end of this year.

A San Francisco law firm, which was sued by the bankruptcy trustee in charge of liquidating Thornburg Mortgage, has asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, calling it "long on rhetoric but short on facts."

The trustee's lawsuit filed in March named attorney Karen Dempsey of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and the firm itself as part of an alleged conspiracy that involved four top Thornburg executives improperly paying themselves handsome bonuses just before the mortgage lender filed for bankruptcy last year.

In court papers filed on Monday, the law firm said the complaint did not show that Dempsy knew about the allegedly improper conduct of the executives.

"Using novel theories of conspiracy and aiding and abetting, the trustee seeks to impose what would be unprecedented 'vicarious' liability on special counsel for a debtor," the filing said.

Lawyer and author Cody Fowler Davis has struck out on his own — again.

He left Davis & Harmon PA, which he formed in 2001, and opened another Tampa law firm this week appropriately named Cody Fowler Davis Trial Attorneys PA. His previous firm is now Harmon Woods Parker Hendricks & Abrunzo.

By all accounts a driven lawyer very much at home in a courtroom, Davis was polite about reasons for the change.

“I just decided it was time for me to leave,” he said. “I was president of the firm and set it up, but some philosophical differences arose. They’re good lawyers, and they’ll do fine.”

The back-story, Davis said, is that he “found a guy a lot like myself” with whom he wanted to practice law. He described Jonathan Brozyna as another driven civil trial and commercial litigation practitioner who successfully tried a lot of cases at a young age — like Davis.

And, like Davis, Brozyna is a tennis player.

“A tennis player bets on himself a lot,” Davis said.

Prior to forming Davis & Harmon, Davis was a partner at Macfarlane Ferguson & McMullen in Tampa. He is certified by the Florida Bar in civil trial law and business litigation. Davis also is a certified mediator in state and federal courts.

Along the way, he winds down by writing and has authored two legal thrillers with Tampa ties, “Implied Consent” and “Green 61”. He has outlined a third book to which publishers want the rights, but Davis is a little too busy right now.

His credentials and profession come naturally almost by osmosis through his old Tampa family. Imagine the dinner table conversation when he was growing up at the Davis home. His late father was a judge, and his grandfather, Cody Fowler, was a founder of what is now Fowler White Boggs and an American Bar Association president.

Davis plans to grow his new firm some, possibly to four lawyers.

“I’m used to working hard and long hours and like a lawyer who shares the same desires and goals,” he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by Pfizer Inc. that sought to thwart a securities lawsuit alleging the drugmaker misrepresented the safety profile of the blockbuster pain drug Celebrex.

The plaintiffs alleged that Pfizer's Pharmacia unit deliberately withheld the full results of a medical study that showed no safety advantage to using Celebrex over less expensive anti-inflammatory drugs.

Pfizer argued that investors missed a two-year statute of limitations to bring the lawsuit. The investors said there was no evidence of a possible fraud until the Washington Post published an article about missing Celebrex data in August 2001, meaning their April 2003 lawsuit was within two years of that development.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled last year that the lawsuit was not filed too late. The Supreme Court let that ruling stand without comment.

The high court's denial of Pfizer's appeal comes a week after the justices ruled unanimously that investors didn't wait too long to file securities lawsuits alleging that Merck & Co. misrepresented the safety of painkiller drug Vioxx. Pfizer's appeal had been on hold pending the outcome of the Merck case.

The Supreme Court says the family of a now-deceased immigrant who was denied medical care for cancer while in custody cannot sue federal medical officials for damages.

Salvadoran immigrant Francisco Castaneda was denied a biopsy for a painful penis lesion while in prison in California, despite outside specialists' recommendations. He was later diagnosed with penile cancer, had his penis amputated and died.

Castaneda's family sued the U.S. Public Health Service personnel who denied the biopsy. But the government says the law gives its medical personnel absolute immunity against lawsuits.

Federal courts have refused to throw out the lawsuit. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor says the government's position is correct. She wrote the opinion for a unanimous court.