UK firm Mayer Brown has sold its corporate secretarial practice to outsourcing provider TMF Group, with a team of six support staff transferring to TMF's London office later in the year, reports legalweek.com. The move is similar to that involving Clifford Chance, which signed up with TMF last year. The firm cited the global nature of client needs as the main reason for the deal.

NAUGHTY PROSECUTORS GO UNPUNISHED

Only a miniscule percentage of US prosecutors who engaged in misconduct were disciplined by the State Bar of California over a 12-year period, reports law.com. According to a recent report, issued by the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law, there were 707 cases between 1997 and 2009 in which courts explicitly determined that prosecutors had committed misconduct. Among those cases, only six prosecutors were disciplined.

STUDENT SUES OVER MURDERED HOOKER LINK

Austrian firm Wolf Theiss is advising a Slovakian student in a defamation case against three Viennese newspapers after her Facebook profile photo was mistakenly used in a story about a murdered prostitute who shared the student's name, reports The Lawyer. Three of Austria's daily newspapers used photographs from the student's Facebook page, with one later replacing it with yet another image of the wrong person.

A-G BACKS DOWN ON BAR DIVERSITY

The UK attorney-general's office has dropped demands on bar members of the Treasury Solicitor Panel of Counsel to disclose equality and diversity credentials, reports The Lawyer. The measures, which were brought in last year under Labour attorney-general Baroness Scotland, required all sets with even one barrister on the panel to provide documentation proving they had progressive diversity policies.

REED SMITH AND THOMPSON "TALK"

UK firm Reed Smith is in talks with US firm Thompson & Knight over a merger which could boost its number of lawyers to around 2000, reports The Am Law Daily. Thompson managing partner Jeffrey Zlotky confirmed that the firms are engaged in "preliminary" talks over a potential combination, but added that they have not yet reached the stage at which he would take the proposed deal to the full Thompson partnership.