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Hire Order, Ltd, and Robert Privott, are both good ol’ boys and good boys. These two entities, which operate federally-licensed gun shops in Virginia and North Carolina, follow the law to perfection. That law, however, prevents these two licensed dealers from selling guns to each other at a gun show. The two dealers attempted to challenge the interpretation of the statute, but were shot down due to the six year statute of limitations....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Google has entered into a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to address perceived privacy violations relating to the social network, Google Buzz. The Google Buzz settlement requires Google to implement a comprehensive privacy program and to be subject to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. Why could this end up being a big deal?...

Something that many solo attorneys hear perhaps all too often is the interjection: “You cost too much!” We’re sure you’ve heard this one before. Even with the advancement in technology making a fair number of attorney services quickly obsolete, there are still a great many tasks that should only be handled by a competent attorney. Here are a few tips for handling sticker-shocked clients. “You Cost Too Much!” It’s to be expected....

What set this attack apart, though, was how it was accomplished: through the Internet of Things. Hackers commandeered thousands of internet-connected devices like webcameras, routers, and baby monitors, and turned them into weapons used to cripple the net. Here’s how the attack appears to have gone down. Thousands of devices engaged in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the servers for Dyn, a domain name system host. In a DDoS attack, nearly endless data requests are sent to a server, overwhelming it and preventing it from responding to legitimate requests....

Somewhere in the law school experience, students are taught to fake it until they make it. It often carries over into law practice when they take new cases on the path to becoming competent. Professional rules explain that. But sometimes lawyers are simply incompetent and won’t face it. Are you? Dunning-Kruger Psychologists have a name for people who think they are great even when they are terrible, and it almost sounds like a law partnership....

Volkswagen just can’t get away from the foul-smelling fallout of Dieselgate. After settling with regulators last year, it looked like the company could move on from charges that it cheated on emissions tests. Investors also claimed the automaker misled them about compliance with emissions regulations, but a judge dismissed the case. The judge also gave the plaintiffs leave to amend, however. Now the automaker is back in the thick of it....

A recent Fifth Circuit ruling, which affirmed OSHRC’s interpretation of a key OSHA provision, should prove helpful to companies concerned about compliance issues. Apparently, a cookie-cutter approach simply will not do. As Walmart learned, if you’re a company with multiple identical buildings that must be OSHA compliant, it’s no good arguing “they’re all the same, anyway.” It was a strange outcome at the circuit level. Although it was found that the offending company Walmart was in violation of OSHA, it still managed to wiggle itself off the hook with a truly modest sum: $1,700....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. If press reports are to be believed, personal data on 207,000 army reservists potentially have been compromised as a result of laptops that were stolen recently from the offices of Serco Inc., a government contractor. Apparently, the data was contained on a CD-Rom that was inside of one of the laptops that were stolen....

President Trump’s travel ban was halted a month ago by a federal judge in Seattle. Last Monday, the President issued a new, revised ban, a slightly adjusted version of the original executive order, now better tailored to withstand legal challenges. The new ban is scheduled to go into effect this Thursday – but not if several states have their way. Washington, Hawaii, and others are rushing to halt the new order before it can be implemented....

Faculty Senate of Fla. Int’l. Univ. v. Winn, No. 08-15647, involved a Supremacy Clause challenge to Florida’s restriction on the use of state money for travel by state employees to countries that the federal government listed as “State Sponsors of Terrorism.” The court vacated partial summary judgment and a preliminary injunction in favor of plaintiffs, holding that no federal law said that states could not differentiate among foreign nations when it came to spending for academic travel....

Employees quit all the time, but do you have the sneaking suspicion that several employees are quitting all at once? Maybe you’re just paranoid, but as they like to say, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not watching you. A mass exodus of employees can and does happen, for a variety of reasons. Here are some common exodus scenarios and what you might be able to do about them:...

The First Circuit affirmed in whole the summary dismissal of an employee’s disability discrimination claims on Monday, ruling that the employee failed to prove a prima facie case of repeated violations. The case is sure to come as a relief to employers who have often complained that federal anti-discrimination laws are overly onerous and hamper business and profits. As employment lawyers are aware, the federal Americans With Disabilities Act requires an employee complaining of disability discrimination to show a disablement, an adverse employment action, that the position was later filled, and that he or she could have performed the job with or without a “reasonable accommodation....

Letting go of your landline is a little like letting go of a lifeline from a boat. You want to do it, but you don’t feel confident unless your feet are touching the bottom. “What ifs” keep popping up in your mind like shark fins circling you in the water. What you’re really afraid of is the cost. Do you really need to pay for a landline when everybody has a cellphone?...

This case is now doubly-interesting, and a possible candidate for Supreme Court review. Way back in 2008, a putative class of female store managers sued Family Dollar Stores, Inc., a chain of discount retail stores, alleging that they were paid less than their male counterparts, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, and Section 216(b) of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, 29 U....

In plaintiff’s products liability action against manufacturers and retailers of a power saw that severed his three fingers when his hand came into contact with the saw’s unguarded blade, district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendants is vacated and remanded where: 1) district court’s denial of motion to remand is affirmed as a procedural defect existing at the time of removal but cured prior to entry of judgment does not warrant reversal and remand of the matter to state court; and 2) district court’s exclusion of plaintiff’s expert testimony is reversed as the circumstances of the case did not justify such a sanction....

Advising clients on how to handle their social media before and after filing a case is a minefield. The general consensus is that clients should not post anything about their case, and that posts and comments, even if not public, should be kept to a minimum. A recent decision from New York Court of Appeal, the state’s highest court, makes the above consensus even stronger. The court clarified that Facebook posts, if relevant to a case, cannot be withheld from discovery on privacy grounds....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. You might like to think that you can move about in the world without being noticed. Perhaps you relish the idea of being able to disappear into a crowd while not being recognized. But such notions of anonymity are disappearing. Of course, you probably have heard about GPS tracking that can be used to determine the specific geographic whereabouts of a person....

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a secretive place, but earlier this year, likely because of that whole government-is-spying-on-everyone scandal that still, somehow, hasn’t blown over, they decided to be more transparent. They ordered the Department of Justice to turn over their prior rulings which interpreted Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Yesterday, the DOC politely declined. What was the court’s response? Way back in September, the FISC issued the following order:...

It’s rare that I need a 4G data connection. There is Wi-Fi at home. There is Wi-Fi at the office. There is even free Wi-Fi throughout downtown San Jose (though the city’s moniker of “WickedlyFastWiFi” ought to be changed “WickedlyFlaccidWiFi”). For me, however, today is a day when 4G is a necessity, as I am reporting live from the Moscone Center at the ABA Annual Meeting. Though Moscone also has free Wi-Fi, the train ride up here didn’t....

Four years ago, Congress passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act, which removed barriers that keep the public from providing capital to startup businesses; equity crowdfunding was about to be legalized. Then, just this May, the SEC’s “Regulation Crowdfunding” rules went into effect. Suddenly, every regular Joe and Jane can become an investor in new companies. It’s one of the biggest changes to securities law in decades, and it could result in a lot of small time investors, and small companies, needing your legal guidance....