Edit inb4 comments: I am not making any judgments of this firm, or implying that these things are in any way related. Additionally, as pointed out, this story is from 2013 and has been settled. It is interesting, however, to see this old story popping up now.
IANAL, but if Apple can show that McAleese had access to confidential iPhone data and transmitted that to his wife, or even advised her on her suit (his advise would be tempered by what he knew of apple's situation), wouldn't that be grounds for disbarment?
Not necessarily disbarment, but that would be one possible outcome. He will likely be facing violations of the rules of professional conduct.
Using California and your example, that would violate Rule 3-100. With the ownership stake, he probably violated Rule 3-300 which governs "Avoiding Interests Adverse to a Client."
"Judge Orrick ruled in August that John McAleese, husband of FlatWorld co-founder Jennifer McAleese, violated his duty as an attorney by assisting his wife's company in its effort to sue Apple.
However, he ruled that there was no evidence that McAleese, now a partner at McCarter & English LLP, actually possessed confidential Apple information or passed it on to Hagens Berman, so he denied Apple's request to disqualify the firm."
English is not my 1st language. You have 2 options: "Apple, betrayed by its own law firm" or "Apple was betrayed by its own law firm", you cannot just say "Apple betrayed by its own law firm".
There seem to be different conventions for headlines because they are not always complete sentences. For example, many newspapers would be fine with "Man killed by unknown assailant" as a headline, or "Budget increase passed by legislature", which have the same grammatical structure as "Apple betrayed by its own law firm".
Edit: oops, but that's not what this headline did. Nonetheless, the headline seems reasonable to me as a native speaker.
Not the same structure at all. "Apple betrayed by its own law firm" is passive voice; your example is active voice. Passive voice in English is constructed with "to be" as the conjugated "helping verb" and the past participle of the actual verb. This is also why the law firm must be prefaced with "by"; the actor is not included in passive voice. earlyriser is correct in his proposed insertion of "was".
The equivalent to your example would be, "Law firm betrayed Apple, its client."
In case no one here is aware, this firm has also been in other headlines recently:
> Lawyers who said Trump has no ties to Russia named Russian law firm of 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/12/law-firm-rus...
Edit inb4 comments: I am not making any judgments of this firm, or implying that these things are in any way related. Additionally, as pointed out, this story is from 2013 and has been settled. It is interesting, however, to see this old story popping up now.