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Readers of a particular age – by which we mean at least 30 – will remember the days of the mechanical computer keyboard, when depressing the keys made a satisfying “clack” sound. Those sounds are gone because the old mechanical switches have largely been replaced by simple rubber domes that contact the circuit board under the keys. We wrote about mechanical keyboards last year, but avoided the big question; namely, what kind of keys you want with your keyboard....

We’ve talked about the importance of branding your law practice. Branding your firm is an important element of law firm marketing. It defines your firm. It sets you apart from the competition. Branding is about definition– first you define your practice area and then, you define your image by creating an online presence. But you can’t define your brand without defining your clientele. Sometimes, the best type of client development occurs by word-of-mouth from former clients....

Residents of Massachusetts might remember that in October 2011, a surprise “nor’easter” swept across New England, downing power lines, closing roads, and – most importantly – depriving cable customers of “Sopranos” reruns. A scant month later, four plaintiffs filed a suit in state court against Charter Communications, their cable company, because their cable service was down for nine days. Charter removed the case to federal court under the Class Action Fairness Act, then moved to dismiss on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ case was moot, as they had already received a credit on their bill for the time the service was down....

Corporate Counsel Magazine’s “Legal Issues in the Energy Industry” is designed for general counsel, senior legal in-house counsel and executives working in the Energy Industry. It will cover the latest regulatory, legal and business issues in this continuously evolving industry. This conference will cover both traditional and alternative energy industries.Topics to Be Covered include: Obama Administration Approach Towards Energy Arbitration Issues in the Energy Industry - Domestic and International Infrastructure and Alternative Energy 2009 FERC Enforcement Issues Legislative Initiatives at the State and Federal Level for Energy Current Trends in Royalty Litigation:Private ActionsState ActionsClass Actions Energy and Water Management Issues: Impact of Exploration/Production and Water Resources Climate Change and Energy Energy and the Environment: Prospects for Partnership?...

Wells Real Estate Inv. Trust II, Inc. v. Chardon/Hato Rey P’ship, S.E., 09-1969, concerned a challenge to the district court’s grant of defendant’s motion for summary judgment in a suit for breach of contract involving a commercial building in San Juan, Puerto Rico, following a large fuel spill at the building that caused significant damages and displacement of the building’s tenants. In vacating in part, the court held that the district court erred by entering summary judgment sua sponte as to plaintiff’s entire material damage claim without appropriate notice....

The case may be sealed, but that hasn’t stopped curious members of the tech community from mining as much information about the Lavabit appeal as possible. The ultra-secure email service shut its doors in August after it faced surveillance requests, the specifics of which were supposed to be kept quiet per a gag order. Instead of giving the NSA unfettered access to his users’ data, the company’s founder Ladar Levinson chose to turn off the servers, stating that he was “forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit....

Last month, Sen. Marco Rubio, in a move some say was motivated by politics and the candidate’s sexual orientation, used his blue slip privileges to reverse course on a district court judicial nominee that he previously approved. The move, unsurprisingly, was criticized by many. In a reaction piece, Leslie Proll, the director of the D.C. Office of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund criticized the move before shifting her focus to a different, albeit related issue: diversity on the Court of Appeals bench....

Following suit with Judge Derrick Watson out of the Federal District Court in Hawaii, Judge Theodore Chuang, in the Federal District Court in Maryland, has issued a preliminary injunction against President Trump’s newest “Muslim ban.” Presidential Proclamation 9645 has been enjoined from being enforced against the Muslim majority countries. The written opinion of the court goes to great lengths to explain the history of the executive action, and it chronicles President Trump’s public and official statements on the issue....

One fish, two fish, red fish, short fish? John L. Yates is a commercial fisherman. In 2007, he was hauling in some red grouper when a fisheries officer boarded his ship to inspect his haul. After measuring the fish and finding that some of them were less than the minimum size of 20 inches, he issued Yates a citation and set aside the short fish for inspection at the docks....

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to lift the preliminary injunction blocking President Trump’s Executive Order seeking to prohibit transgender individuals from serving in the military. The Stone v. Trump matter is one of a few cases the administration is fighting out over the hastily demanded ban on transgender individuals in the military. Back in November, a Maryland federal district court granted challengers of President Trump’s anti-Transgender proclamation a preliminary injunction to block the executive order from going into effect until the litigation concluded....

If the oh-so-dreamy Mad Men star Jon Hamm appeared on your porch and demanded entry to your home to look for a hooligan, you would happily admit him. Pour him a stiff drink. Sit for one of his clipped-toned, Don Draper-esque observations that would leave you questioning your life choices, but happy that your path had been corrected by such a charismatic passerby. If South Carolina bail bondsman Jon Ham showed up on your porch with a shotgun and demanded entry to your home to find a fugitive, you might end up arguing qualified immunity in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals....

Google Glass has been making headlines lately for where it is getting banned, and the company might soon be able to add another place – the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). OK, a “ban” is too strong a word, but all of Google’s efforts thus far to trademark the word “Glass” have fallen short. Google Glass Trademark Google has already successfully registered the term “Google Glass,” but it is now trying to register the term “Glass” in that slick typeface you may have seen online....

In September, Google suffered a defeat at the hands of the most powerful woman in Silicon Valley, Judge Lucy Koh, whose courthouse credits include the Apple v. Samsung dispute, the secret anti-poaching agreement labor class action, and more. The Gmail scanning lawsuit, which is just one of the privacy-related lawsuits pending against the tech giant, stems from Google’s practice of scanning all email sent to or from Google email accounts, paid or free, for purposes of delivering advertisements or gathering “big data” for user profiles and market research....

Recently, we heard a truly odd tale: A California jury makes a mistake on a juror form, setting a man free. Coincidentally, he is murdered hours later, allegedly by his sister’s boyfriend. One of the attorneys in the case blamed it on what he called a “June jury,” college kids who delayed service until summertime. And then, the New York Post published a story on those darn hipsters who have basically ruined everything from cheap beer to run-down neighborhoods … and who now present a problem for practitioners: the affluent hipster jury....

You check your work email on your phone, have a copy of your weekly schedule on your personal tablet, and access company docs from both your work and home PCs. Welcome to the age of BYOD: bring your own device. BYOD policies – be they official or informal – allow employees to bring their personally-owned tech devices to the workplace and use them to access privileged information. And with BYOD comes plenty of risk....

A bevy of solo attorneys recently responded to the American Bar Association’s invite to comment on the proposal to allow non-lawyer investing in law firms. Forty-three individuals submitted their comments: only one thought it was a good idea. Now that may sound like good new for those opposed, but a growing number of advocates claim that the changes simply mark the inevitable. Lawyers Are Skeptical, to Say the Least As mentioned above, only one out of the 43 responding lawyers or law students who decided to write in a response to ABA’s invitation thought it was a good idea that the rules be relaxed....

Could your next contract attorney work for you from across the globe? Possibly. The growth of legal process outsourcing means that more and more lawyers are contracting with foreign attorneys and even nonlawyers to perform legal work. The practice has even gotten a nod from several local bar associations, which note that attorneys may outsource work to foreign practitioners, so long as they abide by the same ethical requirements applicable to the domestic use of nonlawyer services....

Among the new gadgets at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: an upgrade for a mobile credit-card reader. It’s part of a trend that’s changing the way merchants, including law firms, get paid. Software maker Intuit showed off its redesigned GoPayment Card Reader at CES, the website iSource reports. The reader is a small device that connects to a smartphone or tablet to allow users to swipe credit cards for payment processing....

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld all but one of the convictions against Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson this week. Jefferson had claimed in his appeal that the charges against him were improper because his attempts to influence foreign officials fell outside his congressional job description and because the bribes he received were not part of an explicit quid pro quo agreement. The Fourth Circuit concluded that “an absurd result would occur if we were to deem Jefferson’s illicit actions as outside the purview of the bribery statute simply because he was rewarded by periodic payments to his family’s businesses,” reports the Times-Picayune....

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a law firm publishes content on its Facebook page, but it appears in no one’s News Feed, does it make an impact? We’ve talked about Facebook going “pay to play” recently, but according to a blog post by the company last month, the change toward de-emphasizing promotional posts from pages (unless you pay for advertising) may be rapidly accelerated to the point of invisibility for those who refuse to fork over francs to Facebook and for those who are transparently spamming the feeds of folks who “liked” their law firm’s page....