Gnomish asshole Tribune owner Sam Zell is getting sued. By his own (current and former) employees! They filed a class action suit in LA today charging that "Zell's illegal and irresponsible actions and public statements have damaged the reputation and business of the company." Which is legalese for "You made all the Tribune employees take ownership of this shitty company under your stupid ESOP plan and we'd rather not all go broke, thanks." We imagine Zell is uttering some colorful expressions right now in response. ("Fuck you!" is what we mean specifically). This should be interesting! Click through for the full press release.

Gadzooks: at Bloomberg LP, the financial news company owned by NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg, six dozen women—"about one in seven of the roughly 500 female employees who became pregnant in the last six years"—are now suing the company for being treated unfairly. That's up from an initial plaintiff count of three. It's almost as if there's some sort of unfolding pattern here:

It's been more than a year since model Le Call had dinner one rainy night at Nello, borrowed an umbrella from owner Nello Balan on her way out the door, and then never returned it. The umbrella she took, though, wasn't one of those cheap pieces of junk you buy for $5 on the street. According to Balan, the parapluie had been a gift from Jean-Paul Gaultier and was worth $5,000, which explains why Nello started calling the model to get it back. Unfortunately for Balan, Le Call didn't have it in her possession any more; she'd given it to financier Nathaniel Rothschild, who eventually turned it over to Balan—in two pieces. Balan responded by filing a $1 million lawsuit against both Rothschild and Le Call for emotional distress. (He later amended the claim and asked for $30,000.) Last Friday, the case was finally resolved when a noticeably annoyed judge threw the case out and then fined Balan's lawyer for filing a frivolous lawsuit. The judge's full ruling after the jump.

70-year old San Diegan William Gillis has added "civil conspiracy" to the list of allegations in a lawsuit against Apple and AT&T. More 3G devices on a local network means less data bandwidth and possibly disconnections, both problems which have plagued the latest version of the iPhone since launch. The conspiracy charge is on top of false advertising allegations he already filed — the conspiracy being that Apple and AT&T knew that the advertised performance would suffer if sales estimates for the devices were actually met or exceeded, hence the two companies oversold the device. [Wired]

Insurers will pay Apple $14 million in a settlement of a suit brought by shareholders against the company's executives. This brings the scandal over backdated options — where company officials changed the date of option grants so that executives like CEO Steve Jobs would have a lower strike price, without accounting for it in the company's books — pretty much to a close after the SEC settled its case against former corporate counsel Nancy Heinen. The $14 million will neatly cover an estimated $8.9 million in attorney fees and expenses. [AP] (Photo by Getty/AFP)

As if it wasn't enough that Eliot Spitzer's career, credibility, and friends disappeared into thin air when his sexual improprieties were exposed, now his legal bills are going up. Two former New York Racing Association officials have filed suit against Spitzer for prosecuting them when he was attorney general. Spitzer had argued that the officials had taken bribes to allow overweight jockeys to ride in races, but the officials were later cleared of the charges. Now the two men involved, Mario Sclafan and Braulio Baeza, say Spitzer cost them their jobs and their reputations and they'd very much appreciate $100 million or so for conspiracy, abuse of process, and false arrest. (How much do state racing officials get paid?). The full 38-page complaint after the jump.

The Justice Department is probably going to bring an antitrust suit against Google, experts are beginning to say. Yesterday, the department hired former Disney superlawyer Sandy Litvack to take a closer look at Yahoo's deal to outsource search to Google. “They wouldn’t bring in a special counsel unless they were preparing to litigate,” says Sam Miller, the lawyer who defended Microsoft's antitrust trial. Former FCC official Blair Levin agrees. Levin wrote in a Stifel Nicholas research note yesterday that "the hiring of a lawyer with this kind of background is far more rare, and, in our memory, the times when this has happened the Department brought a case." The irony: if the U.S. does win the case against Google, it won't be the search giant which feels the most pain. Yahoo would lose $250 million to $450 million in cash it's counting on raking in.

Back in July, the NYPD revealed that it planned to set up cameras across the city and track every single car that came into town. Based on London's "Ring of Steel" program, the NYPD plan calls for the installation of some 3,000 security cameras, mostly in lower Manhattan. As you might expect, the New York Civil Liberties Union isn't so jazzed about a plan that would allow the city to keep track of you every waking minute of the day. Yesterday the group filed suit against Ray Kelly and the NYPD over the department's refusal to share information about how it actually plans to carry out the program. The full suit after the jump.

Though it's no guarantee that the Department of Justice will take the companies to court over the deal for Google to broker Yahoo's search advertising, the hiring of hotshot litigator Sanford Litvack is a sign that the investigation is getting serious. After all, David Boies was hired by the DOJ in 1998 to press the agency's case against Microsoft. And now that it's not just competitors like Team Redmond but customers complaining about the deal, there's more incentive for the government to intervene. Of course, Google fans can look at this as something of an achievement — it took Microsoft twenty years to draw attention from government regulators concerned about monopolistic practices. Team Mountain View has done it in only half the time! (Photo by AP/Kevin Heslin)

Meet Russian financier Andrei Vavilov, who paid a mere $53.5 million for a triplex penthouse at the Plaza and is now suing to get his $10.7 million deposit back. His complaints? "Unobstructed floor to ceiling windows," "lower than represented ceiling heights," and "unappealing drainage grates." Good luck with that. [NYO]

British engineer Kane Kramer created a device in 1979 called the IXI which could store and play back three and a half minutes of music. He patented the device and even founded a company to sell it. By 1988, funding ran out and he couldn't afford to renew the patents. Improbably, Apple now calls him an inventor of the iPod. The U.K.'s Daily Mail, which first reported the news, says it's the story of a wronged inventor who has never seen a dime from the 163 million iPods sold worldwide. "I can’t even bring myself to buy an iPod for myself," says Kramer, who has closed a legal loophole for Apple, conveniently and cheaply.

Sotheby's, the auction house, is suing CNET founder Halsey Minor for $16.8 million it claims he owes for artwork he bought in a May auction. Minor says Sotheby's misled him. Sotheby's says Minor told it he couldn't come up with the cash because he was owed money by others. Oh, and CBS bought CNET for $1.8 billion earlier this year. So CNET founder Halsey Minor ought to be rolling in the dough, right? No. And therein lies a twisted tale that ties up a heralded artwork, Edward Hicks's "Peaceable Kingdom," with Minor's dotcom-era fibs."They have a massive failure to disclose,'' Minor told Bloomberg. "They have an economic interest to misrepresent the facts." Minor plans to countersue. Longtime CNET employees might say the same about Minor. In March 2000, when he stepped down as CEO right before the Nasdaq peaked, he said, "As a large shareholder, I would not have made this move unless I thought I would generate more value to shareholders this way." Inside the company, he encouraged employees to hold onto their shares, too. It was technically true that Minor remained a large shareholder. But through a financial maneuver known as a collar, he guaranteed that his shares would hold their value, even if the stock price dropped. The CNET employees he encouraged to stay and hold onto their shares had no such protection. It was a massive failure to disclose. He had an economic interest to misrepresent the facts. The curious thing: Having protected his CNET fortune eight years ago, why did Minor claim he didn't have the money to pay for the art he purchased? He's spending heavily on real estate, including a $15.3 million, 476-acre estate in Williamsburg, Va., and Florida's Hialeah Park racetrack. Could Minor's investments have gone so sour that he's been caught in a cash crunch? If so, forgive CNET employees who saw their options sink underwater, on Minor's advice, a moment of schadenfreude.

It's been dragging on forever, the 2001 class-action lawsuit filed by shareholders who claim Larry Ellison and his team lied about the company's financial shape prior to Q2 '01 — back when New York still had a World Trade Center. Now, local district judge Susan Illston has ruled that Oracle conveniently failed to preserve Ellison's email from that period, as well as tapes and transcripts from Matthew Symonds, who interviewed Oracle's yachtbuilder-in-chief at length for his Ellison biography, Softwar.Illston, who won fans among copyright wonks for ruling in favor of fair-use DRM hacks, is pretty clear that she doesn't see the lost evidence as an accident: "It is appropriate to infer," she wrote, "that the emails and software materials would demonstrate Ellison's knowledge of, among other things, problems with Suite 11i, the effects of the economy on Oracle's business and problems with defendants' forecasting model." Oracle spokespeople are keeping a tight lip on the situation.

Nude supermodel photo scandal lawsuit alert! An anonymous model has filed suit in Miami against Egotastic.com and Splash photo agency for taking pictures of her sunbathing in her birthday suit (NAKED) in her own backyard—"as is often done by professional models to avoid tan lines." Invasion of privacy and emotional distress! But who is this mysterious, super-beautiful plaintiff? She helpfully includes several clues [UPDATE: the case may already be cracked!]:

In America (the Land of the Free) you can't win a libel suit unless you can prove not only that what was published was false, but also that it was published with actual malice—i.e., you must show that someone meant to hurt you on purpose with false information. But in the UK, the situation is the opposite; it's up to the publisher to prove what they wrote is true. So offended parties from across the world practice "libel tourism," filing suits in the UK against writers and media outlets who have only sold a few copies there, in order to take advantage of the crazy English laws. Luckily our (USA) legislators have now done something useful by protecting gossip sites like us from libel suits across the pond. Here's how one evil Saudi billionaire is helping Gawker write more freely: Commentary has a think piece out this month on new legislation signed by New York's heroic blind governor last spring, which allows judges here to invalidate libel judgments obtained in countries with lesser free speech protections (hello, UK). The prime motivation was reportedly the nonstop libel tourism of Khalid bin Mahfouz (see below), which threatened to bankrupt some journalists. Huzzah for our right to write things, and yours to read them! Here are some of recent history's most notable libel tourists:

Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded, an acerbic site where entrepreneurs review venture capitalists, dropped by the office of McDonough Holland & Allen the other day. That law firm represents EDF Ventures, which is the VC firm that's to be avoided unless you're "desperate," according to TheFunded's users. EDF is suing in order to reveal the identity of a critic who posted a poor review of the Michigan-based fund for misrepresentation. A common practice among VCs embarrassed by bad reviews.Ressi had the cheek to make a little video where he personally delivers the documents EDF requested. He assures the audience that they contain no information that will identify "John Doe," the unnamed defendant in the suit. The smiling Ressi makes a thumbs-up gesture at the end, clearly mocking the litigants. It also suggests that such charming and friendly customer service can be yours if you pay to promote your fund on the site.

Meet Daniel "Maimon" Kirschenbaum, Esq. He's only 29—he graduated law school in 2005—but it's safe to say that if the James Beard Foundation gave out an award to the biggest thorn in the side of New York-area restaurateurs, he'd rank up there with inspectors from the Department of Health and ungenerous restaurant critics. Kirschenbaum is a partner at a firm called Joseph & Herzfeld and the go-to man for servers and other restaurant employees when they take on their bosses for skimming tips or firing them without cause. Thanks to word of mouth (and well-placed ads on certain websites), Kirshenbaum has been obscenely prolific in the past couple of years. Just a few of his targets: Heartland Brewery, Nobu, Jean Georges, B.B. King, Bouley, BondSt, Balthazar, One Little W 12, Abigail Kirsch, BLT Steak, BLT Prime, BLT Fish, and 40/40.

Philip Berg is a political activist, lawyer, and all-round nut. (He is not the same Philip Berg who founded the Kabbalah movement, incidentally, although they're as crazy as each other.) You may have heard Berg's name back in 2001 when he tried to have Supreme Court Justices O'Connor, Scalia and Thomas disbarred for their role in Bush v. Gore. Or when he sought to file murder charges against President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Well, he's back: This time the diehard Hillary Clinton supporter has filed a lawsuit to declare Barack Obama a foreign-born citizen, which would mean he wouldn't be eligible to serve as president. And where does Berg's evidence come from? Wikipedia! So it must be true! The full suit below.

So Andres Martinez, the former LA Times editorial page editor who just sued his former flack girlfriend for her stunning betrayals of his confidence? Maybe totally crazy! As we mentioned this morning, Martinez's suit came after his ex, Kelly Mullens, filed a restraining order against him in DC for stalking her and generally being a psycho. According to her filing, Martinez (who now works for the Washington Post and the New America Foundation) spent months emailing her, her family, and her professional contacts, calling her mom a "whore," inventing a separate false identity, and threatening to kill himself. Yea. Here are some of the most salient allegations, which purportedly quote from Martinez's own emails: The two broke up. Then Martinez allegedly emailed Mullens over and over and over, moaning about his lost love and his bad mental state, and promising to stop contacting her (which she told him to do). But it just kept on, and got worse:

When Americans think about reasons to visit Britain, what usually comes to mind is seeing old castles, eating scones, and drinking tea. But, for celebrities at least, there's another excellent reason: taking magazines to the cleaners! Apparently Jennifer Lopez, Harrison Ford, and Britney Spears are all indulging in "libel tourism," which was inaugurated in 2000 when London-based Russian émigré Boris Berezovsky (more here) took action against Forbes for portraying him as "a brutal thug and crook."