Everybody knows that David slew Goliath, so how could that story be an analogy for solo attorneys and big firm lawyers working together? It’s not gonna happen, unless you change the story like this: David knocked down Goliath, and then they respectfully formed a partnership; or David only challenged Goliath, and then they agreed to give each other referrals. So don’t read too much in this story, “How a David Can Partner with Goliath....
Chief Justice Roderick L. Ireland, the first African-American on the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts, announced Monday that he is retiring. Roderick’s announcement means Governor Deval Patrick will have an opportunity to name a new head of the state’s highest court before he leaves office next January, The Boston Globe reports. Given the timing of Ireland’s retirement, Patrick is uniquely poised to make a long-lasting impact on the composition of the Supreme Judicial Court....
If you’ve been looking for an excuse to purchase an iPad, Thomson Reuters has your solution. It’s an app called Thomson Reuters ProView, and it allows you to access handy legal tools, like codes and court rules, from your iPad. It’s the type of product that – in our lawyering days – would have only existed in a parallel science-fiction universe. So why is ProView better than accessing the same information on your laptop, or using a book?...
Lawyers do it every day. But for one pair of form-crossed Ohio lawyers, who did it and didn’t redact, the state’s bar decided to set an example. The two lawyers met at a conference and hit it off. They both were part of similar legal practices representing public schools and began romantically seeing each other. Over a period of two years, the two shared client confidences and unredacted legal forms and client emails freely, even after they got busted....
Is copyright troll Righthaven bankrupt? That seems to be the million dollar question after the company recently failed to pay $48,000 in court-ordered legal fees and interest to Wayne Hoehn, one of the few to successfully defend himself against claims of copyright infringement. Over the weekend, Hoehn filed papers asking the judge to grant him permission to seize Righthaven’s “bank accounts, real and personal property, and intangible intellectual property rights.”...
Three restaurant robberies. Two bullets fired at each. One surviving victim. Anthony Ray Hinton was the triggerman … maybe. According to the original appellate case opinion, the surviving witness, as well as others, identified Hinton as the perpetrator of the third robbery. (He was neither indicted nor convicted for the robbery, but was convicted and sent to death row over the two prior murders.) Then again, his boss and other witnesses claim that he was working in a locked, secured warehouse at the time of the robbery....
The Supreme Court this morning vacated and remanded a Fourth Circuit ruling in favor of Gavin Grimm, a transgender Virginia student who had sought to use the boy’s room at his high school. The Fourth ruled last April that courts must defer to Department of Education guidance on the issue, guidance that interpreted Title IX as requiring transgender students to be treated in accordance to their gender identity, even when it came to bathrooms....
The SEC just approved changes to crowdfunding rules that will allow small companies looking to raise money to seek investment from small, non-accredited investors. Who are those non-accredited potential investors? Just to give you an idea, that’s about 91 percent of American households. The traditional model required complicated underwriting processes for equity investing. The new crowdfunding changes are some of the most sweeping made to the model of buying and selling securities to date....
If you’ve been delaying actions hoping for the next big anti-regulatory move from the White House, you might want to just stop holding your breath. In a recent report by CNBC, it explains that 90 percent of the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions have been struck down in court. It is then suggested that the administration needs to do their homework before taking deregulatory action. And while you might want to delay your spending to come into compliance with regs that might be on the chopping block, that 90 percent loss rate should give you pause....
Sometimes the law is technical and cruel, and sometimes the law is technical and correct. Most people will probably come down on the latter side of that when it comes to the technical application of the law in the Adil Elmakhzoumi v. Sessions case. In that matter, an immigrant seeking naturalization was rejected because of a prior conviction for sodomy without consent. On appeal, he argued that the law technically prohibited the naturalization of individuals with rape convictions, not sodomy without consent convictions....
For breakfast, I had a plea deal and four billable hours. For lunch and dinner, I’m having an eight-hour shift of blogging. Why do I do both? My day job allows me to watch Justice Scalia lose his mind and to express outrage at Georgia’s attempts to execute a mentally disabled man with bootleg-ish lethal injection drugs. My law practice allows me to help people who otherwise couldn’t afford counsel and gives me practice experience....
For Plaintiff’s attorneys, medical malpractice damages caps are a very real concern. But are there other ways around the caps? The lawsuit alleged that a defective circumcision clamp led her son’s doctor to remove 85% of the tip of his penis as opposed to just the foreskin. He requires surgical and psychiatric care perhaps for the rest of his life. While a botched circumcision would ordinarily be filed as a medical malpractice suit, City News Service reports that attorney Browne Greene decided to file a defective product lawsuit against Miltex....
It seems more American couples are pursuing legal separation agreements these days as they consider divorce. Savvy attorneys may want to take note. Case in point: Colorado, where 72% of divorcing couples filed legal separation agreements last year, up from 60% in 2007, The Denver Post reports. The sluggish economy means more couples are seeking separation agreements instead of racking up costs in contentious court battles, the Post suggests. Even in an era of do-it-yourself legal forms, that could mean a lot more work for attorneys....
Medicare Fraud Conviction Affirmed In US v. Rodriguez, No. 08-16696, the court affirmed defendant’s Medicare fraud conviction where, at the sentencing hearing, defendant did not object to the judge’s comment about her national origin, or to anything else for that matter, and: 1) holding that the law did not require objections to statements appearing to indicate bias where there was none would be inconsistent with the law requiring objections where there is bias; and 2) such a holding would substantially undermine the important interests served by the contemporaneous objection rule....
If a “perfect storm” means a confluence of conditions ending in disaster, what would be the opposite? The darkness before light? A cloud with a silver lining? Whatever it is, there has been a change in the weather for women in the law, at least in one practice area. Women may be better represented in health care law than any other practice area. According to some practitioners, it happened because of perfect conditions....
Maybe you heard the news yesterday. Yahoo, one of the world’s largest Internet companies, announced that it will be spinning off its core businesses in order to hang on to its $32 billion stake in Alibaba, the massive Chinese e-commerce company. The decision is the exact opposite of the plan proposed by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer almost a year ago. Why is Yahoo ditching its main businesses in order to retain Alibaba stock?...
The U.S. Supreme Court justices are drawing nearer toward retirement: Ruth Bader Ginsburg just turned eighty-one; Antonin Scalia is seventy-eight; Anthony Kennedy is seventy-seven; and Stephen Breyer is seventy-five. If President Obama gets the opportunity to fill another Supreme Court vacancy, whom will he select? Jeffrey Toobin recently penned a piece for The New Yorker called “The Supreme Court Farm Team,” referring to federal judges Obama can choose from whom he appointed himself....
FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. To date, approved Web site suffixes have included the omnipresent .com, and also the commonly used .gov, .edu and others. Is .xxx on the imminent horizon for adult-oriented Web sites? Well, according to press reports, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that oversees approval of top-level domains, has finally given in and granted conditional approval of the new ....
Have you ever thought about giving an iPad to your clients? Two Arizona attorneys are doing just that. Marc Lamber and James Goodnow have been utilizing tablet PCs to their fullest, and including doling out the tablets (on loan, of course) to 20 of their clients. The creative use of technology is aimed at making their law firm more accessible to their clients, and is also used so that the attorneys can create presentations, reports The Arizona Republic....
If you buy a phone using a fake name, you may be throwing away your reasonable expectation of privacy with regards to that device. At least that is what the federal government is arguing in one Arizona case. The case involves a criminal defendant, Daniel David Rigmaiden. He is accused of filing approximately $4 million worth of fraudulent tax returns starting in 2005. The FBI used a device called a “stingray” to catch Rigmaiden....
