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Univision, the Spanish-language broadcast company, won the auction to buy Gawker Media yesterday, for an offer of $135 million. Univision will take over Gawker after outbidding the digital media company Ziff Davis, by $45 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. Gawker Media, whose network of websites pioneered the gossipy, confessional medium of blogging, declared bankruptcy last month, after the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan won a $140 million invasion of privacy lawsuit against them....

A claim under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics is essentially a Supreme Court-created version of 42 USC 1983, a statute conferring a cause of action for state officials’ violations of a plaintiff’s civil rights. Plaintiffs can get money damages under Bivens, as they can under 42 USC 1983, but can undocumented immigrants get damages for Fourth Amendment violations allegedly committed by border patrol agents?...

Sure, attorneys aren’t the biggest early adopters of new technology. You won’t find many esquires who are well-versed in artificial intelligence or nano-architecture, for example. But it turns out that we’re also terrible at technology basics. The Legal Tech Assessment, a program developed to test attorneys’ skill at simple office tasks like redacting information from PDFs, has proven time and again that lawyers often fail at basic law practice technology, wasting time and client money....

How do you manage outside counsel? In particular, how do you manage billing and behavior? In response to rising legal costs, corporate counsels have sought ways to manage outside expenses. Some have turned to the flat fee, while others have refused to pay for first-year associate work. Pfizer has taken a somewhat different approach–one that it believes has produced better legal outcomes and cost-savings. For almost three years, Pfizer has managed outside counsel through its Legal Alliance Program....

Ashot, Vergine, and Haik Gasparian are citizens and natives of Armenia. The Gasparians entered the U.S. in the early 90s, and overstayed their visitors’ visas. They admit they never intended to return to Armenia, where they had received threats due to Ashot’s business dealings with an Azerbaijani man in the late 70s. In 1994, Ashot filed a request for asylum and withholding of removal for the family. The immigration judge (IJ) denied the Gasparians’ applications in 1995, expressing doubt about harassment through the early 90s for business activities ending in 1978....

The ExxonMobile industrial complex in Baytown, Texas is a sprawling place. Stretching over nearly 2,500 acres over five square miles, the complex, the second largest oil refinery in the country, is capable of processing more than half a million barrels of oil a day – along with significant amounts of air pollution. And according to Texas environmental groups, Exxon’s plant regularly violated the terms of its operating permits, belching far more pollution into the air than what was permitted....

Former CIA Director David Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell reportedly used a draft email trick well-known to teenagers and terrorists in an attempt to conceal their intimate relationship. The two would compose draft email messages using a shared Gmail account, reports The Washington Post. Instead of actually sending email to each other, both Petraeus and Broadwell left unsent messages in a draft folder or in an electronic dropbox. The other person could then log into the same account and read the emails there, without creating an actual email trail....

After wills, trusts might be one of the most commonly used estate planning tools. You can set up a trust for your children, for charity – and for your gun? Gun trusts are growing and increasingly common way to pass firearms between generations. (Of course, gun trusts aren’t for the gun in the way charitable trusts are for charity – the firearms, or money meant to purchase firearms, make up the trust res or corpus....

What took so darn long? Law firms are now moving into the 21st Century of data analytics. Analytics have been adopted by so many sectors of business one almost wonders why law firms have been so slow to adopt the use of real time data analysis in running their own businesses. The traditional practice of determining a partner’s compensation based on highly subjective criteria is going the way of the dinosaur....

If you’re like most lawyers, you know that your very presence in the life of a client is a gift in and of itself. As such, when the holidays roll around, an unbilled phone call just to check in is probably as much of a gift as you really need to give any client. Unless, of course, your taxman tells you that you have some money to burn. But, if you’ve been visited by the ghosts of Christmas, and you’re in the giving spirit or just looking for some deductions, since you’re not as rich as Scrooge, below you can find some tips on how to decide which clients to give gifts....

The new iPhone 5 is expected to be unveiled September 12 and all signs point to it having access to 4G LTE as part of the deal. If you’re already on the iPhone bandwagon chances are the new model will look attractive but do you actually need to upgrade your phone? No one knows that kinds of additional features the phone will have but assuming the only real plus is the 4G LTE (we know we’re underselling the potential upgrades), would it still be worth it for attorneys to upgrade?...

A Texas judge issued a very scathing and very public finger wagging at the Department of Justice lawyers who argued the DOJ’s case before him concerning President Obama’s amnesty program. In fact, a few were ordered by the judge to learn their place and to take ethics courses. Considering the effort and length of his extraordinary order, we have to mention how interesting it is that Judge Andrew W. Hanen takes “neither joy nor finds satisfaction” with his actions....

Note to future lawyers. Here are things you don’t do in a deposition, held in an expensive foreign locale, such as Italy: coach witnesses, tell them how to answer questions, or walk out and cancel all remaining depositions without a really good reason. How much in sanctions? Close to a million dollars, with attorneys’ fees and expenses included. The original order, however, ordered sanctions against the plaintiffs, not their attorney. After the district court clarified via Rule 60(a), the lawyer’s lawyer missed the deadline to appeal....

We’ve got a lot of prisoners in the United States – nearly a quarter of all the prisoners in the world. Yet, despite such a high incarceration rate, the actual workings of the criminal justice system occur largely outside the public’s awareness. In an effort to shed light on a system “shrouded in secrecy,” Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project and Slate magazine are launching “Trials and Error,” an ongoing series focused on “the reality of the justice system, and how to fix it....

In December, a Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision on off-label use promotions made life less complicated for pharmaceutical sales reps in New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. The appellate court ruled that a drug manufacturer’s off-label use promotions are protected free speech, as long as such promotions are not false or misleading. The 2-1 majority reasoned, “In the fields of medicine and public health, where information can save lives, it only furthers the public interest to ensure that decisions about the use of prescription drugs, including off-label usage, are intelligent and well-informed....

In Chaparro v. Ruiz-Hernandez, No. 08-1989, the First Circuit faced a challenge to the district court’s grant of plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment in their 42 U.S.C. section 1983 suit brought by a group of twenty-two contract employees against a Puerto Rican municipality and its officers, arising from early termination of their employment some five months prior to expiration of their one-year contract. In affirming part of the judgment, the court held that plaintiffs had a reasonable expectation of continued employment, and that a one-year term of employment with Puerto Rican government bodies is generally considered a protected property interest for procedural due process purposes....

Who says there’s no compromising in today’s Washington D.C.? Way back in September, we passed along a rumor that the White House was mulling over a “West Wing”-like deal to fill the numerous vacancies in the Eleventh Circuit. The Democrats would get their long-desired nominee, Jill Pryor, who was blocked by Georgia’s Republican senators last year, while the Republicans would get their choice, Judge Julie Carnes, an extremely qualified district court judge appointed to the bench by President George H....

Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), “to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education” and that “the rights of children with disabilities and parents of such children are protected.” In exchange for federal funding, the IDEA says that a state must provide special education tailored to each disabled child’s needs “at public expense” and “at no cost to parents.”...

There are apps for monitoring your billing, apps for tracking your time, apps for invoicing clients. There are even apps that allow you to send and receive cash with the click of a button, meaning you can pay and get paid without ever having to see a bank teller again. Such money transfer or “peer-to-peer payment” apps have exploded in the past few years as companies have moved to take advantage of a market that sees more than $1 trillion in transfers every year....

When a thief stole a lawyer’s laptop, in retrospect the attorney partially blamed himself. He left it in plain sight on a countertop, where the burglar could easily see it through the glass door of his house. The lawyer had also left a light on in the house to ward off a potential break-in, but saw his strategy differently when he returned home and peered through the broken glass. “The same feature that contributed to my peaceful light a few hours before now gave a clear view of the countertop where my MacBook Air sat under what I now imagined to be a spotlight of my own making,” John E....