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The key to starting a successful law practice may be finding the right niche. As a result, attorneys are dividing and subdividing practice areas to become masters of their domain. This trend is especially noticeable in family law, as divorce for men law firms have been popping up. After all, half the clients in a divorce will be men. By being a divorce lawyer for males, you can cater (and market) to the unique fears of getting a raw deal as the husband, reports The Wall Street Journal....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. The London 2012 Olympics games were successful, and indeed spectacular, on many levels. Of course, there were incredible performances by phenomenal athletes, including veterans like Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, as well as new breakout stars such as Missy Franklin and Gabby Douglas. Great Britain also served up wonderful musical acts for entertainment purposes....

Want to be a lawyer and work from home? We don’t blame you. The commute is shorter, the dress code is looser, and your family (or at least your pets) are right by. Luckily for you, working as a lawyer from a home office is fairly common, and becoming commoner. Even the biggest firms are letting attorneys work from home some of the time these days. So, if you want to locate your law practice down the hall from your living room, you can....

How complicated is getting paid by credit card? In an ideal world, one would only need a credit card processor, such as the many ones we’ve talked about that handily operate via an attachment to your smartphone. If a food truck can take plastic, lawyers certainly should be able to do so too, right? Except IOLTA accounts. Damn trust accounts. If you’re taking payment in advance of services rendered, things get immensely complicated because most credit card processors take their cut out of what the consumer pays – which creates an obvious ethics issue for unearned fees that are supposed to be sitting in your IOLTA account....

When it comes to the whole hiring game, there is a fundamental difference between the BigLaw paradigm and the small practice paradigm. One of the most glaring differences? Money and perks. In fact, just the prestige of going to a large law firm is oftentimes enough to lure new grads. It’s true, small firms have it tougher when it comes to choosing the cream of the crop. But they really should be looking for different qualities in a new hire....

You don’t want to be Scrooge this holiday season, but it might be a bit too late to order a Christmas turkey for everyone in the office. Do you default to a Starbucks gift card or an envelope of cash? No way! There’s still plenty of time to get an affordable, last-minute holiday gift for your staff. Here are our top seven recommendations. Don’t fight the holiday weight gain, encourage it with some tasty gifts....

After getting a chance to sit and play around with Amicus’ new cloud-based offering, and after expressing our mostly positive thoughts on the product, we sat down with Ron Collins, CEO of Gavel & Gown Software, the company behind Amicus Attorney and Amicus Cloud. When designing the cloud-based version, did you try to mimic the desktop version in the browser or redesign it from the ground up? One of the main things that sets Amicus apart in practice management is our very friendly proactive approach where Amicus reaches out to help you and doesn’t just provide a passive database where you have to go look for things in....

Could it be that women lawyers are a better fit at corporations? Courageous Counsel tells the stories of 42 female general counsel in the Fortune 500. The book looks at how female attorneys make up about 20% of GCs at these companies, while they only hold about 6% of equity partnerships in the AmLaw 200. Why the gap? Could it be the skills? Corporations place a higher value on women’s people skills, says Susan Hackett, former general counsel of the Association of General Counsel....

When a judge frames the issue in a case, sometimes it’s a hint about which way the hearing is going to go. “Rebooting the Ninth Circuit: Why Technology Cannot Solve Its Problems” was the titled issue of a hearing before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee. It was not a good sign for the American Bar Association, which weighed in on the issue. “Contrary to the conclusory title of your hearing, the ABA believes that technological and procedural innovations have enabled the Ninth Circuit to handle caseloads efficiently and maintain a coherent and consistent body of law,” Patricia Lee Refo wrote for the ABA....

Trademark research is about as fun as combing through discovery. The slow, often tedious process normally involves lawyers or researches pouring through databases to make sure that the mark is available to be used and registered. That means long, slow searches through state and federal registrations, as well as looking for marks that are unregistered but in use. Don’t forget about all the fun but hard-to-find variables like phonetic equivalents, spelling variations, and foreign language uses, either....

The Jacksonville Jaguars’ Paul Vance apparently fumbled in drafting a series of team contracts, and now he’s out of a job. The Jaguars’ new owner fired Vance as the team’s general counsel and vice president of football operations Sunday, ESPN reports. A potentially costly typo is likely to blame. The typo appears in the contracts of seven former assistant coaches who signed contract extensions in 2010, according to ESPN. The team intended the extensions to last two years, through the end of the 2011 season....

Who polices the police? They do, and we all benefit from the lessons learned. FBI agents are taking self-portraits and sending dirty texts to each other. Is anyone actually surprised? According to CNN, the FBI has resorted to suspensions and warnings, depending on the level of conduct. One employee who continued to date (and eventually marry) a drug dealer was terminated. Another tapped the boss’ office and snuck out the supervisor’s written comments about the employee....

What’s $3.5 billion from one company to another? For General Motors, it’s the cash needed to acquire AmeriCredit Corp. The deal is designed to give auto dealers an additional option for financing cars for buyers of new vehicles. Since 2006, GM buyers have faced less appealing financing options than GM had offered in the past. With the AmeriCredit deal, they expect to be able to offer better financing terms, particularly for sub-prime borrowers....

Remote desktop apps are not a new thing. Microsoft released a free app for accessing your Windows Desktop from your iOS (Apple) or Android (Google) devices a while back, but it was limited to certain versions of Windows (Professional and Server). Third-party solutions, like Splashtop, have been around for a few years as well, but they cost money. Yesterday, Google released its own version, one that reportedly works with Windows, Linux, Mac, and Chrome OS, so long as you use Google’s Chrome browser....

Lawyers can always count on divorce as a steady business, along with wills and taxes. That means divorce, with all its attendant family law implications, could be a place where you direct your marketing focus. It’s hard to market divorce, though. No one wants to come out and say, “Gee, maybe it’s time for a divorce,” as though you’re buying a new car. What you can do is emphasize results, and appeal to people who are already thinking about it....

Hypothetical: After putting countless hours into a case you know you can win, the other side ships over a dismal settlement demand or offer that you know is garbage, and to your dismay, your client, even after being told it’s garbage, still wants to accept it (without even countering). While the public may exclaim: “Cue the tiny violin!” for many lawyers, this is uncharted territory. For some lawyers, this is a big red flag....

They say old tricks are the best tricks – at least in the movies. In “The Fifth Element,” a future Bruce Willis learns that he wins a contest. But he was tricked with one of the oldest tricks in the book, er, movie. And so it is today. According to a new report, hackers have long been able to spoof digital signatures and email with a decades-old bug. Decades-Old Bug For the everyday internet user, spoofed email is a known enemy....

A lawyer generally needs to plead the facts of a tort claim with specificity, but a plaintiff can survive summary judgment in a Federal Employers’ Liability Act (FELA) claim, even when a few facts are missing. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that a railroad employee can proceed with his claim against Norfolk Southern Railway Company (Norfolk Southern), even though he couldn’t identify the rail car that allegedly caused his injury....

Though it was only created within the last few years under the America Invents Act of 2012, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has been the situs of much intellectual property drama and bloodletting. Generally, boards that are this young need even a decade or two to pass before lawyers can start generating a nice spreadsheet of precedential cases. But the recent tidal wave of PTAB appeals before the Federal Circuit has reminded us of the importance of in house counsel’s understanding of the whole PTAB process....

It seems obvious, in retrospect, that the mass adoption of smartphones would lead to a vast increase in muggings: people are carrying $600 devices on them, after all. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened, and iPhones were especially popular. (Those white earbuds are a dead giveaway.) We’ve covered a handful of proposed laws, at the state and federal level, that would mandate on-by-default (opt-out) “kill switches” in smartphones. The idea is that if this is a nearly universal feature, thieves are going to give up – after all, it’s really hard for a casual thief to flip a locked iPhone....