Posts

Following celebrity gossip isn’t amongst my pastimes, nor is taking pleasure in the misery of Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian. Other than wishing that one of my favorite players, who has dealt with a lot of personal tragedy, would get into rehab and get his life in order, I haven’t followed the tale of his drug addiction, his marital troubles, or his alleged affair with recent Pepperdine Law grad and California Bar Admittee Polina Polonsky....

A former executive of Tiffany & Co. was arrested for allegedly stealing $1.3 million worth of Tiffany’s jewelry from the company. The former vice president of Tiffany, Ingrid Lederhaas-Okun, 46, is accused of stealing 165 pieces of jewelry over the course of two years, including diamond bracelets, earrings, and pendants. Lederhaas-Okun was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of interstate transportation of stolen property; if convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, reports CNN....

The Fifth Circuit’s Court of Appeals decided to play the game of a Texas Attorney who moved for a panel rehearing. A motion itself is nothing new, but the way Texas attorney Chad Flores attempted to make his point certainly bears reflection. He presented the court with a hypothetical conversation between an attorney and his disappointed client in order to demonstrate to the court how silly it would be to affirm the lower court decision....

Tom Wolfe famously quoted Judge Sol Wachtler’s opinion that a grand jury would “indict a ham sandwich” in The Bonfire of the Vanities. The relative ease of grand jury indictments could be attributed to the fact that very little evidence is safe from a grand jury subpoena. But can a grand jury subpoena records from an investigation subject’s lawyer? The answer, according the First Circuit Court of Appeals, depends on the nature of the requested records....

It’s the morning of your first big hearing. They didn’t prepare you for this in law school – how could they? Nonetheless, you feel a crippling pain in your gut borne of nervousness and a near-certainty that you will botch something when you step in the courtroom. We all have these moments of self-doubt. The key is finding a routine that helps you to move forward. Though every person’s calming influences vary, here are a few things I do before the “big events” that help me to get into my ideal state of mind: calm on the outside, yet mentally pumped on the inside....

A government shut down over Planned Parenthood has been averted. Yesterday, Congress went to the brink of shutting down the federal government over Planned Parenthood funding and pulled back at the last minute. But the compromise could only be temporary, according to The Washington Post. And of course, there’s always the possibility that another political disagreement could lead to a funding impasse in the future and subsequent shutdown. Some Fed Workers Remain, but Few First, a government shutdown doesn’t signal a vacation from the rule of law, so don’t go telling John in engineering that now’s a great time to slip in those defeat devices....

Last year, in Navarette v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court said that an anonymous tip alleging drunk driving was sufficient to create reasonable suspicion for a traffic stop of the car described. Mississippi doesn’t seem so sure. The state’s supreme court deviated from Navarette earlier this month when it held that police lacked reasonable suspicion to stop a car based solely on an anonymous allegation of drunk driving. Prior to Navarette, a majority of states said that drunk driving was a serious-enough crime to override the U....

At what point do you call out your office manager for taking money from the law firm? When she takes $25,000 for bail on a case? When she pays off the lease on her Mercedes Benz? How about when you realize there’s $2.1 million missing from the firm account? Apparently, that’s what it took for attorney Bernard Charbonnet, Jr. to do something about it. Unfortunately, his office manager was gone before he realized the money was gone....

How many lawyers does it take to own a law firm? One – the rest are banks, landlords, and service providers who own everything that keeps the practice afloat. So it’s not a good lawyer joke, but comedy is sometimes born of sobering truth and many attorneys know the challenges of struggling to stay in business. If only there were an investor … It’s not going to happen, according to a federal appeals court....

When people think about law firms, the word ‘charity’ is not the first word that springs to mind. And these days, it looks like most firms aren’t feeling very charitable. But attitudes can and should change. It’s better for the community and it’s better for the firm’s reputation. Charity work can be an opportunity for a law firm to get noticed in the community and capture good sentiment from would be clients....

Roger Ailes isn’t the only (alleged) sexual harasser in corporate America. Ailes stepped down as head of Fox News recently, following a harassment lawsuit by former Fox star Gretchen Carlson and an internal investigation that “sealed his fate.” And he’s got company. The EEOC alone took nearly 40,000 sexual harassment enforcement and litigation actions in 2014. Those sexual harassment claims can expose businesses to significant liability, even when all the proper policies are in place....

Today, the First Circuit decided two employment discrimination cases, liability of a bankruptcy court appointed receiver, and a matter involving SEC’s action against registered broker-dealer for Rule 10b-5(b) violations. In Lockridge v. Univ. of Maine Sys., No. 09-1895, the court faced a challenge to the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendant in a professor’s gender discrimination, hostile work environment, and retaliation claims against a university. In affirming the decision, the court held that plaintiff’s claims must fail as a matter of law as there was lack of any evidence suggesting that the university’s proffered reason was pretextual, and the employer’s denial of plaintiff’s particular request for office space did not amount to a materially adverse employment action....

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged 36 firms with securities violations connected to the issuance of municipal bonds. Those banks, underwriters of the bonds, will pay between $40,000 to $500,000 for making materially false statements or omissions about the issuer’s compliance with disclosure rules. The enforcement action is the first the SEC has taken under its Municipalities Continuing Disclosure Cooperation Initiative. The MCDC is a voluntary program that allows participating banks to self-report violations in exchange for standardized settlement terms....

Lawyers are generally credited with being good writers, but a number of attorneys are lousy spellers. Every email and word processing program around may offer a spell check, but unquestioning reliance on spell check can lead to even more embarrassing mistakes. It’s not just auto correct failures that can cause trouble. Attorneys can sabotage themselves by accepting spell check changes without proofreading the final, corrected work product. If you’ve ever run spell check in a document with legal terms, you can guess that such a practice can produce unfortunate results....

Just five days after hearing oral arguments in an employment discrimination lawsuit, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that an employer may not discriminate against a transgender employee on the basis of gender non-conformity, reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In a unanimous opinion, the three-judge panel ruled that the Georgia General Assembly’s Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC) violated the Equal Protection Clause’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination by firing Vandy Beth Glenn after she revealed plans to undergo gender reassignment surgery....

Twitter says it will remove revenge porn – ’non-consensual nudity’ – even before victims know it is posted. It’s a great idea, but how is that going to work? Like, how will Twitter know if something is “non-consensual” without the victim saying so? However it happens, it’ll be interesting. The new program starts next week. “Twitter Safety” In a blog post, the company says it is doing everything it can to fight revenge porn, harassment, and hate speech on its platform....

Conviction for storing mercury without permit US v. S. Union Co., 09-2403, concerned a challenge to a conviction of a natural gas company for storing hazardous waste without a permit. In affirming the conviction, the court held that defendant is precluded by 42 U.S.C. section 6976(b) from challenging the EPA’s 2002 Immediate Final Rule authorizing Rhode Island’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) regulations as, because defendant failed to use the statutory procedure for judicial review, defendant may not raise the issue by collateral attack....

What’s the big chip problem? The security of your computers and smart devices are most likely compromised. How bad is it? It’s not bad enough to throw them out, but you better fix it soon. What can lawyers do about it? Before considering a class-action lawsuit, download a security patch. Big Chip Problem Intel Corp. announced that its chips – which run most of the computers and smartphones in the world – are vulnerable to attack....

James McIntosh was sentenced to 120 months, the mandatory minimum sentence for his convictions on a drug-trafficking charge and a weapons charge. Due to a technical error in the original indictment, and a more substantial mistake by the government in handling that error, no indictment was pending against McIntosh at the time of his sentencing. So McIntosh appealed, questioning the district court’s power to sentence him at all. According to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the district court retained the power to sentence McIntosh, and its exercise of that power did not violate any of his constitutional rights or run afoul of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure....

Joann Davis was an elderly widow of an Apollo engineer trying to hawk an extra-terrestrial rock when she wound up in trouble with the space agency. After Davis contacted the agency for help selling the rice-sized rock, in part to cover her son’s medical bills, NASA organized a sting, detaining Davis in a Denny’s parking lot, and declining to let her use the restroom, even as she wet herself. Davis sued NASA, for a detention that was “unreasonably prolonged and unnecessarily degrading,” in violation of the Fourth Amendment....