Breaking News! GCs make a ton of money. We can hear you now: “Tell us something we don’t know!” Yes, it’s not polite to talk about money. But we’re a lawyer site, and um, we’ll, let’s just say you all are not in this job because you love dealing with annoying problems and clients. Or not entirely. So let’s get to it. How much are GCs really making off with today?...
The Judicial Conference of the United States announced a new national policy this week encouraging federal courts to limit the instances in which they seal entire civil case files. The policy states that “an entire civil case file should only be sealed when … sealing … is required by statute or rule or justified by a showing of extraordinary circumstances and the absence of narrower feasible and effective alternatives, (such as sealing discrete documents or redacting information), so that sealing an entire case file is a last resort....
Is it 2010 already? That’s the last time Microsoft Office for Mac, the ugly stepchild of the Microsoft Office family, got a whole-number update. Well, you can throw away your Ke$ha album and upgrade to something more modern, because Microsoft has announced that Office for Mac 2016 is coming in the second half of 2015. And what’s the best part? There’s a free preview available right now! We spent some time with the Office for Mac 2016 preview, and here are our first impressions:...
Are you using social media? Your colleagues are. Inside Counsel has followed up on its 2010 survey with the 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey, and the results are pretty interesting. Researchers talked to 334 GCs, chief legal officers and other corporate counsel, and 86% of them reported using some sort of new media. Most of them preferred LinkedIn, too. The biggest surprise this year involves older counsel – attorneys in their 40s, 50s and 60s....
Matthew Mglej is not your ordinary street musician. One fine day in Portland, Oregon, Mglej went to play his violin outside the federal courthouse. Before playing, however, he took off his clothes. “He removed his suit and laid it out in a symbolic straw man metaphor to convey a message of transparency in government,’’ his lawyer argued inside the courthouse. But as one judge said, nudity is transparent all by itself....
If you ask certain tech prognosticators, money transfer apps are the future. Forget Twitter, Candy Crush, or Kim Kardashian’s $200 million app – apps that let you buy a beer, split a bill or pay back a debt with just a few swipes of the finger are where the future is, supposedly. As such, Facebook, Snapchat and a host of new start ups have been scrambling to lock down the market....
Law students are finishing up their finals and gearing up for their summer jobs. But is your firm ready for your summer associates? What are you going to do when they show up on their first day? After introducing them around the office, what are they going to work on? A few simple considerations will ensure that your law firm benefits from the summer associates you’ve hired, and vice-versa. Here are three tips to keep in mind:...
If you are crypto-curious about investing, maybe you should save your real currency and just read this story. The Securities and Exchange Commission is shutting down an initial coin offering by PlexCoin. In its first enforcement action, the SEC’s cyber fraud unit alleges the offering is fraudulent. It’s a major development in the virtual currency market. The demand has been so furious, regulators have not known how to deal with it – until now....
For the majority of young attorneys looking into how to start a law firm, after financing, their main concern is picking a practice area. While one can certainly go into general practice, the legal field has been moving towards increased specialization, pushing lawyers to become incredibly knowledgeable in one part of the law, hypothetically increasing one’s ability to effectively represent clients. Choosing to go this route can cause a lot of anxiety, with few knowing where to start....
FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. We made it through 2016. So, what’s in store in 2017 when it comes to hot tech issues? There are many hot issues, such as big data, intellectual property disputes, the sharing economy, and drones. But this blog covers the three potential biggest issues. Drum roll please – here we go! Hacking, hacking, hacking …...
One month. Five and a half million views. Has any lawyer commercial, ever, come close to this? Jamie Casino is now Internet famous, and if this reality television deal pans out, he could become nationally famous. That’s right folks – the lawyer with the flaming sledgehammer, who bought two minutes of Super Bowl ad space, just nabbed a reality television deal, and it came after a massive bidding war. According to Deadspin, Warner Horizon Television has signed Casino for Casino’s Law, a primetime unscripted reality television series....
Are you tired of carrying around credit cards? So are your clients. One of the top growing technologies this year is near field communication, or NFC. By adding an NFC chip into a cell phone, manufacturers give you the ability to use your phone at any tap-to-pay credit card machine. Right now, they are found most frequently at retail stores, but the day isn’t far off where they could be widespread, TIME reports....
Since the inception of the United States, the Alien Tort Claims Act has given a forum in U.S. courts to aliens harmed in violation of U.S. treaties or international law. To that end, more than 4,000 Colombians sued Chiquita (the North Carolina-based banana company) in the United States, alleging that Chiquita acted in concert with paramilitary forces in Colombia, resulting in injury and death. The cases came to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to decide some concerns over the plaintiffs’ pleadings, but the Eleventh Circuit dismissed the lawsuits, finding that U....
Judges are not supposed to read the newspapers in making their decisions, but it’s hard to ignore the news. According to reports, there has been an average of one school shooting each week in 2018. The number of student victims is even more sobering. In the U.S Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges had to look beyond the news when considering a “disturbing schools law.” Nobody was close to being shot in Kenny v....
Advanced Body Care Solutions, LLC v. Thione Int’l., Inc., No. 09-13151, involved an action arising out of a contract that required a company to make minimum purchases of products in exchange for an exclusive license to market and distribute them. The court affirmed judgment for defendant on the grounds that 1) the district court properly rejected plaintiff’s argument that defendant’s shipment of the defective ampoules breached the entire Licensing Agreement; 2) because the Licensing Agreement did not clearly express that the listed remedies were the exclusive remedies available to defendant, regardless of what the parties’ intentions may have been, the Agreement did not effectively limit defendant’s remedies; and 3) the jury’s verdict, which did not exceed the amount of defendant’s expert’s calculations, was neither against the great weight of the evidence nor excessive....
Petition for review of a denial of plaintiff’s second motion to reopen immigration proceedings to allow him to apply for adjustment of status based on his marriage to a United States citizen is denied where Board of Immigration Appeals did not abuse its discretion in finding that plaintiff had not exercised the due diligence required to invoke the equitable tolling of the time limitations on his untimely motion to reopen. Read Chedid v....
If you pride yourself on being on the bleeding edge of technology, then you may want to consider signing up to get your nanodegree in self-driving cars. The new program, being offered by Udacity, is designed to bring more focused talent into the workforce, where there is currently a high demand for engineers and programmers that can work on self-driving vehicles. If you are light on the programming experience, you’ll likely fall behind in the technical areas rather quickly, but there’s more to this program than programming....
Growth is good, right? More clients, more money, more opportunities for your business. Yet, for many lawyers, growth can be a headache, if not a nightmare. If you’re running a small or boutique firm, growth can disrupt a carefully calibrated work-life balance, lead to extra overhead, and put you even farther behind on your obligations. But not if you’re doing it right. Smart growth, which focuses on planned, strategic expansion, can help you avoid many of the pitfalls that can occur when you simply add client upon client....
Ash v. Tyson Foods, a racial discrimination lawsuit, has been toiling in federal courts for over a decade. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has considered the case four times. The Supreme Court has heard the case. So why has this case demanded so much judicial attention for so long? In part, because the courts could not agree on whether the word “boy,” when applied to an adult, African-American man, qualified as a racial epithet....
Should a robot be granted legal status with rights like human beings? I know I saw a movie about this somewhere, but now it’s a real-life question in the European Union. In a report by the Committee on Legal Affairs for the European Parliament, the government proposes laws on the creation and ethical treatment of smart robots. The resolution says that robots, androids, and other forms of artificial intelligence are poised to “unleash a new industrial revolution, which is likely to leave no stratum of society untouched....
