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Now that the Senate has failed to pass a resolution and a judge has refused to issue an injunction, American businesses are officially subject to the National Labor Relations Board’s new “quickie election” rule. As of Monday April 30, the rule became law. The provisions are expected to shorten the time between the filing of a representation petition and a union election. Experts are predicting that the timeframe will drop from 56 days to about 30....

What do we know? Or, what do we think we know as of this second in time? The National Security Agency are a bunch of privacy-invading geeks with supercomputers. App developers are mining data for advertising through pervasive permissions on your smartphones. So is it any wonder, whatsoever, that the NSA is reportedly siphoning data off of these apps? This ought to do wonders for Rovio’s sales. According to The Guardian, the medium for all of Snowden’s leaks, both the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) siphon personal data, including location, age, gender, and even sexual orientation, from popular smartphone apps....

Sonic weapons have been around for some time, but a new application could be cause for concern in the future. At the recent Black Hat Conference, researchers from Alibaba Security demonstrated how a sonic gun could disrupt many of the new smart technologies that have been released to the public and consumers. The researchers were able to show how a drone could be taken down, a “hoverboard” could be disoriented, and robots made to fail, with the use of homemade ultrasound emitting systems....

Litigation against schools is nothing new. A dispute over school funding in Kansas, for example, has been going on for 27 years – and it’s currently threatening to upend the state’s school system. The classic civil rights triumph, Brown v. Board of Ed., was, of course, about public education. But for private schools, numbering over 30,000 and serving more than 5 million students, litigation has been rarer. And when it occurred, it was often the result of contract or employment disputes....

Did you ever have that moment when a teacher or a speaker pointed in your direction, and you turned around only to see no one behind you? That’s what it’s like when you are a solo practitioner at the end of your career and you don’t have a succession plan. It looks like there’s no one to take over and it’s all on you. Of course, solo practitioners are the champions of doing things their way....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Once upon a time, at the turn of this century, when the commercial internet starting becoming a reality, we had the first opportunity to purchase holiday gifts online. This seemed like a big experiment. Would our orders really get fulfilled? Would the gifts arrive on time? Was it safe to give a credit card and other identifying information on the World Wide Web?...

“I am not the source of knowledge. I am a guide to it.” That’s how I introduced myself to students when I taught law school. I was explaining my teaching philosophy: “In this laboratory of learning, we discover more when we participate together because collectively we know much more than any one person.” This philosophy was especially true when I taught students in the school’s externship program, monitoring their progress as they worked in the legal community....

In-house attorneys need your services. How can you convince them of this? If your knee-jerk approach is to send sports tickets or cocktail party invites, you may need to reexamine your strategy. Landing business from in-house clients isn’t easy. Like most things in life, it’s becoming increasingly competitive. To position your firm for optimal success, there are a few best practice tips to follow. There’s no doubt you’re an expert in your field, but you should think beyond your area of expertise when negotiating with potential in-house clients....

Your company’s overzealous protection of its secrets could put it on the wrong side of Dodd-Frank. The Dodd-Frank Act Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed in 2010, sought to make it much easier for employees to report corporate wrong doing. And the SEC has made it clear that company confidentiality agreements that impede whistleblowing can violate that law. Just last spring, the SEC settled one of its first confidentiality-based enforcement actions, claiming that a corporate confidentiality agreement was unlawful “pretaliation....

A bag of cattle feed fell on the accelerator of a utility vehicle, causing it to run over Gini Nester and break her neck. A jury awarded nearly $16 million because the manufacturer knew the parking brake was unsafe and didn’t fix it. Textron appealed, but an appeals court affirmed. Among other problems for the defendant, there was a video – but not of Nester’s accident. The jury saw a video of a similar accident, and that’s one reason the defendant appealed in Nester v....

More than one in five Americans say they have been injured on the job, a new survey from FindLaw.com reveals. Balking at the idea that injuries are limited to manufacturing and construction work, the survey results show that traditional workplaces are rife with potential hazards. The survey’s findings serve as a worker’s compensation wake-up call for in-house counsel. According to the survey, twenty-one percent of American adults say that they have suffered an injury while on the job that was serious enough for them to take time off of work....

2016 may be the Worst Year Ever, but there are plenty of lessons scattered throughout this year’s rubble. And no, we’re not talking about learning from dead celebrities, international political espionage, or Olympic doping scandals. We’re talking about learning how to be a better, or at least a better-informed, attorney. Here are some lessons we’re taking away from the past year. Email isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of legal technology, but alongside word processing and electronic research, it’s probably one of the technologies lawyers most use....

You want your office to be tailored to your work style and needs. But don’t forget that your office is also a calling card – it lets people who walk in know a bit about you and who you are. You don’t have to be a skilled designer in order to make sure the impression your office gives is a good one – that your work space represents the skilled, put-together professional you are....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni recently signed legislation that severely punishes homosexuality in his country. Indeed, the new law provides for potential life in jail for gay sex – a fact that the bill’s sponsor touted on his Facebook page after Museveni signed it into law, the Los Angeles Times reports. This legal development has led to an international uproar....

The actual search is fairly brief, but employees spend up to 25 minutes waiting in line, and it’s this waiting period that’s at issue in Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk. On October 8, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case. Paul Clement for Integrity Staffing Solutions The case involves incredibly fine details – picayune details, even. At the outset, Justice Kagan gave Clement a hypothetical about whether cashiers’ closing out a register at the end of their shift is compensable....

On FindLaw’s Blotter, we recently told the story of alleged elder abuse and the death of the woman involved, Anne Copeland. EMTs and police were called to Copeland’s home the second week in December to find the 98-year-old wounded and lying in a soiled bed. Her daughter, 60-year-old Gloria Park Clark, was charged with abuse and neglect resulting in death of a vulnerable adult, under South Carolina’s elder abuse statues....

Thanks to the folks over at the ABA, we now have a broader view of the disaster that is law firm intake. The ABA’s findings seem to only confirm the observations of FindLaw’s earlier white-paper: Law firms stink at intake. What does this mean? At the very least, you can stand to keep the business that’s already contacting you. Now doesn’t that just sound like good business practice? ABA’s (Shocking) Findings The ABA’s Law Practice Divisions’ Social Media, Legal Blogs and Websites Committee took decided to explore the status of intake processes around the country and found some firm practices that you might find eye opening....

Lawyers of the digital age already have an array of ethical dilemmas to worry about. But now there’s a new ethics question: Do lawyers have a duty to replace hacked funds? In the opinion of the North Carolina State Bar, the answer is maybe. But in reality, it just gets back to every lawyer’s favorite word: “reasonable.” North Carolina’s Bar’s ethics committee concluded Oct. 23 that so long as a lawyer takes reasonable security measures to safeguard their computer network, they are not ethically obligated to replace funds that are lost when an invader hacks into a trust account and absconds with the funds, Bloomberg reports....

Big headlines have been making the rounds about Jeffrey Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement being invalidated by the federal district court in the Southern District of Florida. In short, the agreement was reached in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, which required federal prosecutors to inform victims of their rights before entering into a non-prosecution agreement with a suspect. The work of Epstein’s lawyers to corner the federal prosecutors into a non-prosecution agreement that kept Epstein’s conduct out of the media’s eyes seems to be what undid the whole deal....

If you started law school after 2001, the year that Elle Woods defended her client by defining mens rea to the court in Legally Blonde, you probably entered your first criminal law class knowing that a conviction requires guilty knowledge.It seems that the Florida legislature disregarded that legal and cinematic pearl of wisdom. In 2002, the legislature amended the state’s Drug Abuse Prevention and Control law to eliminate mens rea. At the end of July, a federal judge in Florida overturned the law, noting that “Florida stands along in its express elimination of mens rea as an element of a drug offense....