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Ah, the perils of collective bargaining. In a truly impressive deal, Unite Here managed to bargain away the rights of workers of the Mardi Gras Casino before it actually represented them. How so? Seeking to represent the rights of the workers, Unite Here entered into a deal with the management of Mardi Gras Gaming: they would pay for ads supporting gambling and the union would promise to forego its rights to picket, boycott, or otherwise put pressure on the business in exchange for an open invitation onto company property, no opposition to unionizing the company’s workers, and the company would even provide the contact information for the employees....

Why do we leave nap time behind as we grow up? In preschool, conventional wisdom says that kids need a nap because they become whiny and cranky without one. Does anyone believe that adults are different? Take a look around your office at 1 or 2 or 3 p.m. Hang out by the coffee machine for 5 minutes to watch your fellow office zombies attempt to caffeinate their way through the afternoon....

The best things in life are free. And, surprisingly, when it comes to internet marketing for law firms, this is very true. But, just because so much SEO is basically free if you can do it yourself, you surely shouldn’t abuse those free sources of marketing to the point where Google suspends your law firm from the internet. For many, it will come as a surprise that there is a large number of lawyers that are gaming these free internet marketing resources....

To paraphrase the chorus of a popular tune, “Blame it on my J.D., baby.” The nation’s second-most-lucrative food adjective (behind low-fat), which brought in $40 billion in sales in the last 12 months, is suddenly being stripped off of labels. No longer will you find “Natural” Goldfish, or “All-Natural” Naked Juice. In fact, PepsiCo just paid $9 million over its Naked Juice labels. And the blame for the disappearing adjective lies (almost) completely with the lawyers, reports The Wall Street Journal....

You know how judges can be with all their crazy demands. No badgering witnesses. Dress appropriately. No unnecessary histrionics. Stand up when you object. Refer to me as “Your Honor.” But 103 year-old Judge Wesley E. Brown has a unique demand: no more lengthy trials. The United States District Court Judge can barely be seen at the bench. The years have caused his body to slowly shrink in size. But his mind remains quite lucid and he has no plans of retiring....

There’s tech savvy and then there’s tech competence. While most lawyers would prefer to be the former, sadly a majority of us only fall into the latter camp. Fortunately, the bar for minimum tech competence is pretty low. Courts generally only require that attorneys have a working knowledge of how to use email, navigate a web browser, and upload documents from their computer to the court’s e-filing system. For some attorneys, staff can be trained to do all these tasks, but in our modern times, clients might not be so accepting of a lawyer that can’t even check their own email....

Will Rogers, the cowboy philosopher, reportedly said that he never met a man he didn’t like. Apparently that was a misquote. In the annals of social history, however, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we need to get along with people – especially our co-counsel. Yes, that means the ones we don’t like, too. Here are three tips that can help: Identify the Problem When you have an issue with a colleague, it’s human nature to think that the colleague is the problem....

Groan. The dreaded billable hour, which, like the last five minutes of a football game, never seems to end. Obviously you need to bill all your time, and you’ve got to be ethical about it, but are you selling yourself short? A survey conducted by timekeeping software provider Chrometa of 500 professionals who bill by the hour revealed that they captured just 67 percent of their billable time. How do you squeeze the remaining 33 percent of that time out of your day?...

A child pornography suspect can refuse to decrypt his hard drive on 5th Amendment grounds, according to a new ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. That is, unless prosecutors first offer him derivative use immunity, which would virtually preclude a conviction. Producing unencrypted files would require the suspect to reveal “the contents of his mind” and force him to admit his “knowledge of the existence and location of potentially incriminating files....

It’s been a busy month for nerds. Two weeks ago comic geeks converged on San Diego for Comic Con, and this week computer hackers swarmed to Las Vegas for Black Hat and Def Con. Both are hacker conferences, but Black Hat is geared toward the “buttoned-up corporate and government security analyst crowd”, while Def Con targets the “counter-culture types,” reports the Las Vegas Sun. Cyber-security is a huge deal, especially now, with all of the Edward Snowden hoopla....

BP received some bad news this week from the Fifth Circuit: It has to pay up according to the settlement agreement it signed to compensate the victims of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill. We wouldn’t hold our breath that this is BP’s last word on the case, but for now it appears that the oil giant will have to shell out billions to affected and possibly affected Gulf-area businesses, Reuters reports....

Wondering just what are the big trends amongst in-house counsel over the past decade? You are in luck, as the results are in. As great changes in the economy and technology force all sectors of the legal market to re-evaluate how they do things, in-house counsel is no exception. Recently, WestLaw Insider reported on the 2010 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey Report, detailing the trends for managing outside counsel and what really matters to corporate practitioners this year and this decade....

A new law in California ensures that law enforcement can’t snoop around your digital data without first obtaining a warrant. The California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA) is the final result of months of pressure from Silicon Valley groups, media organization, and privacy advocates. Digital records are protected under CalECPA. Texts, emails, all electronic communications, and notably, the users geographical location. This information not only cover the data that is stored on your phone, but also the data that is stored online and on the cloud....

Body builders – not lawyers – made up the expression, “no pain, no gain.” There are some mutual truths, however. Lawyers inflict pain, and they usually gain in the process. Of course, that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the pain or gain of changing firms. No Pain, No Gain The wisdom here is in recognizing that pain is part of the growth process. If you think it hurts to change firms, imagine what a caterpillar must feel like turning into a butterfly?...

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. The internet is a relatively new phenomenon. But the following fascinating facts, provided by Inc.com, demonstrate that the internet has gained rapid and ubiquitous traction. For example, while it took 75 years until telephones were used by 50 million users, Pokemon Go was adopted by 50 million users in only 19 days! The first internet website was set up just 28 years ago, and now there are 47 billion web sites....

Can you speak Elvish? Know Middle Earth like the back of your hand? Do you believe that Gollum might actually be the hero of The Lord of the Rings series after all? Well, the Turkish court system needs your help! Dr. Bilgin Çiftçi is currently facing jail time for posting a meme online comparing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with The Lord of the Ring’s Gollum. But it seems no one in the Turkish legal system is familiar with the incredibly popular books and film franchise....

Last year, Kent Zimmerman, a consultant for the Zeugheuser Group, told Bloomberg Law to expect more law firm layoffs and BigLaw dissolutions. It’s a scary prospect for attorneys. While no one expects a recent law grad to be able to find a job these days, we like to believe that the already-employed among us will stay employed. If Zimmerman’s predictions are correct, there could be a lot of unemployed lawyers by the end of 2013....

For some individuals, arbitration might actually be a better option than litigation. And as such, those arbitration clauses that are generally designed to make pursuing legal action more burdensome could actually backfire for employers. In the employment context, in particular, an employee might be better served by pursuing a legal complaint via arbitration than a lawsuit due to the stigma of suing an employer and the fact that arbitration will keep the matter confidential....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. We live in a world in which we are bombarded with information data from many sources, and so much around us on the tech landscape is transparent. How, then, do we keep our tech love alive? Read on. Yes, it is wonderful that we have so many interesting and creative information technology outlets. But at times we are robbed of the magic and mystique of learning about the world with surprise and personal experience....

Nearly everyone, at this point, has received the ubiquitous Nigerian 419 advance fee email scam. An unsolicited email comes from someone in Africa, claiming that a long-lost relative died, or that the South Kenyan lottery just awarded you 18 million dollars. All you have to do is pay a fee to help the money clear regulatory hurdles, or give them your checking account information. Some have speculated that the emails are deliberately bad, so that only the most vulnerable and easily confused will respond, as they’re the easiest marks....