Welcome back to everyone who was out of the office over the holidays, and Happy 2010! A variety of legal news clippings to smooth your way back to working a full week:

• First, 2009 is behind us, and according to numbers compiled by Law Shucks, when it comes to big law firm layoffs, that’s a good thing.
• Now that we’re in 2010, what kind of novel legal thinking can we expect to kick off the decade?
• What about suing your hospital because it wasn’t prepared for a Biblical-scale natural disaster? Now presenting a new litigation product, Medical Malpractice by Katrina! (HT: Overlawyered). Or what about highlighting the possible sociopathy of crime victims?
• Speaking of pathologies, I think John Mesirow at Legal Juice summed it up well when he wrote “it’s not often that an attorney gets busted for doing cocaine, in the courthouse, in the midst of a trial.” Here’s what happened.
• I don’t know who fared worse, the lawyer in the last bullet point (and his client!) or the lawyer who lost his Madoff investment…and then couldn’t share that loss with his ex-wife! (HT: Maryland Divorce Legal Crier).
• In more upbeat news, here’s a well-done and feel-good story about late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s grandson, Peter, a walk-on to the basketball team at Boston College. (As a legal reporter who sometimes wishes he had walked on to his college basketball team, I got a double kick out of this one. HT: How Appealing)

With Bernie Madoff on every investor’s mind, our sister paper, Virginia Lawyers Weekly, offers this post on a recent decision by the 4th Circuit.

 ”The appellate court’s unpublished opinion in Browning v. Tiger’s Eye Benefits Consulting is worth a look for the panel’s discussion of the statute of limitations for breach of fiduciary duty claims under ERISA’s section 413,” Deborah Elkins writes.

The case involves a small tractor company whose 401(k) plan took a hit by investing in U.S. Capital Funding, branded by the 4th Circuit as “in reality, a Ponzi scheme.”

For those of us here in Maryland, it’s also worth noting for one other reason: the author, sitting by designation on the understaffed appellate bench, is our own U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett.