The Morning Wrap

Layoffs: With layoffs running rampant at Allen & Overy, DLA Piper, and Eversheds, The American Lawyer asks whether U.S. law firms will be next. "These are not outliers. They're not anomalies," Zeughauser Group consultant Kent Zimmermann said of the recent layoffs. "It is something that's happening quietly in many, many firms in the industry."

Contraception Battles: Roman Catholics, evangelicals and Mennonites are flooding courts with challenges to a provision in the new health care law that requires employers to cover birth control in worker health plans, The New York Times reports. "This is highly likely to end up at the Supreme Court," said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia and one of the country’s top scholars on church-state conflicts. "There are so many cases, and we are already getting strong disagreements among the circuit courts."

Stepping Down: Lisa Gomer, the general counsel of the U.S. Agency for International Development, is leaving the agency on February 9 amid an ongoing probe into alleged contract rigging, Corporate Counsel reports. Gomer’s attorney, David Schertler of Schertler & Onorato, said his client "did not violate any law." He added that she "cooperated completely" with the Office of Inspector General investigation, according to an emailed statement.

Anonymous: The hacker-activist group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for taking control of U.S. Sentencing Commission's website to avenge the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, The Associated Press reports. He committed suicide this month before he was set to face a trial in February for downloading millions of articles from JSTOR, a nonprofit academic database with a paywall. The U.S. Sentencing Commission's website on Saturday said "a line was crossed."

'Big Chief': U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and President William Howard Taft will race around Nationals Park with presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt during Washington Nationals home games this season, The Washington Post reports. He will go by "Bill" and the "Big Chief" and be on Twitter at @NatsBigChief27.