Larry Sonsini, the most powerful lawyer in Silicon Valley, says he doesn’t believe in miracles. He expects them.

He may yet need one in the stock backdating scandal.

Friday, a federal judge said there were “sufficient allegations” to include Sonsini in a shareholder lawsuit claiming he and other former directors of Brocade Communications knew about rigged options that led to the felony conviction of Brocade’s former CEO, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

In an earlier post, we wrote about Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, comparing him to characters in the classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life.
We said Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke might be playing the role of Clarence, the angel who saved George Bailey.
A new angel for Mozilo and Countrywide emerged yesterday. Bank of America agreed to invest […]

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Early on in the mortgage meltdown, Angelo Mozilo founder and CEO of Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest home lender, was doing a good impersonation of Mr. Potter from Frank Capra’s classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Amidst market panic, Mozilo was acquiring mortgage assets for pennies on the dollar, just […]

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His sales are perfectly legitimate. And maybe they’re even smart. But if Angelo Mozilo isn’t careful, he could become the new poster boy for corporate greed.
Last week, as the mortgage mess whipsawed Wall Street, financial markets around the world, and his own company’s stock, the Countrywide Financial CEO continued […]

That’s what Fortune magazine’s Allan Sloan speculates in a piece about the real reason the Bancrofts sold Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch.

“Rupert has tried to ensure family control by, among other things, having News Corp. spend $11 billion (with shareholder approval) to buy out the big stake held by John Malone’s Liberty Media,” Sloan writes.

Bill Gates still says he is stepping away from the operations of Microsoft next year, as planned. But his competitive fire hasn’t dimmed.
He didn’t miss an opportunity to gig Google in a recent interview with John Markoff of The New York Times.
“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many […]