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Allowing employees to drive company-owned vehicles may be a necessity for your business, but it can also drive your corporation straight into legal trouble. Nationwide, distracted driving accidents take place at a rate of about three per minute, Inside Counsel reports. Some of those crashes involve employees within the scope of their employment, which means employers are often held liable. In one case, a lumber salesman was driving while using a cell phone and caused a crash that left a woman crippled....

Could 3D printing make 3D piracy the new norm? You probably never envisioned the day when you could “print” out a three-dimensional object. It certainly seems futuristic. Well, brace yourself. The future has arrived. Infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay recently blogged about 3D printing. The site’s writers believe that the next step in sharing and copying won’t center on copyrighted movies or music. The next frontier? Downloading actual, physical objects via torrent files called “physibles....

Do you own the copyright to posts that flame you? And if so, is it proper to use your ownership of those flame posts to have them removed from ISPs? Can you? These and others are the issues at the center of a debate that has been roiling around in the courts for some time. Are defamed professionals allowed to own the comments that malign them? The First Circuit will chime in on this issue when it decides who owns the user comments in Ripoff Report reviews....

There’s no end to the creativity payday lenders will go to extract huge interest rates out of desperate people. When states started to regulate them, payday lenders ingeniously contracted with Indian tribes, who were more than happy to share a cut of the money so that payday lenders could be exempt from state usury laws. And thanks to binding arbitration agreements, disputes won’t go to court. But what happens when a debtor challenges a payday loan’s validity in a bankruptcy proceeding?...

What level of responsibility does a board owe to a company with regard to the threat of cyberattacks? According to CIO, a very high level of responsibility. And if anything, a board’s responsibility is particularly unique. In the past, a company’s board has enjoyed relative anonymity and safety from the troubles of day to day management. Nary a company exists anymore that isn’t vulnerable to cyberattack – especially large companies. In the past, officers and board members could comfortably rely on the business judgment rule and some artsy dodging to avoid personal liability of decisions that went sour....

Somewhere, hippies are rolling over in their graves. “The Peace Cross,” a 40-foot monument in Maryland, has been ruled unconstitutional. A divided federal appeals court said it “has the primary effect of endorsing religion and exclusively entangles the government in religion.” It doesn’t matter, the court said, that it has been there for 90 years as a memorial to men who died in World War I. Actually, the soldiers may be rolling over in their graves....

Sugarcoating is not new, but it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds. The process used to be popular in the pharmaceutical industry, when drugmakers used it to mask the taste of pills. The ingredients were cheap and made pills easy to swallow. Companies also “sugarcoat” bad news to make tough times easier to swallow. But it’s time to change. Problems With Sugarcoating Unless you make M&M’s, there’s no good reason to sugarcoat your product or services....

In the fatal stand-off over the migrant caravan, the battle over sanctuary cities has faded from headlines recently. In Paxton v. Travis County, Texas, the issue was even more removed. In that case, Texas wanted the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to declare its law against sanctuary cities legal. The appeals court declined, saying the state suffered no prejudice by dismissal of the case. After all, the immigrants are losing the sanctuary war....

There’s a time to be coy. A time to bat your lashes coquettishly and flirtatiously allude to your thoughts, or reasoning, or motivation. Sentencing is not that time, according to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Joel Dallas Bonner pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine and being a felon in possession of a firearm. The district court imposed a sentence of 151 months on the drug charge and a mandatory minimum 120-month term on the firearm charge....

Eve Saltman is the new general counsel at GoPro, and how cool is that? Seriously, where else would you want to work than at a company that keys the coolest videos ever? Well, maybe a law job at the studio behind Star Wars, but still. In the meantime, Saltman is flying high on her new gig. The company really wanted her, too. No Newcomer About six months earlier, Saltman was the deputy general counsel at GoPro....

A handful of attorneys are lucky enough to have the problem of dealing with public backlash for representing unpopular, high profile clients. When the media makes your client a villain, it’s not always easy for a lawyer to step to the side and not be cast in the same light. But, with high profile clients comes media attention, which is, basically, lots of free advertising. Even when attorneys are maligned publicly for being willing to represent the reprehensible, the process of name/brand recognition is at work....

Your company is growing and the legal department needs to expand to keep pace. Or perhaps you’re one of the 20 percent of in-house lawyers who work solo and it’s time you got some company. Whatever the case, you’re looking to hire. But finding the right candidate takes more than just posting a listing on a recruiting website. Here are some tips to help guide you through the process. To get the best match, you need a clear understanding of the legal issues a new hire will be responsible for....

How can you spot emerging trends in legal technology? You could look at the companies that successful startup accelerators are supporting, like Y Combinator’s recent support for a “Turbotax for Immigration.” Or you can look at public collaborations, like that between Harvard Law School and the legal research startup Ravel Law. Or look at the tech law firms themselves are using, like the few big firms who’ve started to employ artificial intelligence....

In an action by the NLRB seeking an injunction requiring Defendant to offer employment to persons it had refused to hire because of union affiliation, judgment for Plaintiff is affirmed where the District Court properly considered the balance of harms and other equitable factors in issuing the injunction. Read Muffley v. Spartan Mining Co., No. 08-1973 Appellate Information Argued: May 12, 2009 Decided: July 1, 2009 Judges Opinion by Judge Motz...

It’s no secret for immigration practitioners that the current administration isn’t simply exerting pressure on the immigration courts and system. It’s tying hands and caging children, physically and metaphorically. Most recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an opinion limiting the authority of immigration court judges to dismiss deportation proceedings. Sessions’ opinion stated that immigration court judges don’t possess the “inherent authority” to dismiss deportation cases, and can only do so under rather narrow conditions....

One Alabama lawyer is learning a harsh lesson courtesy of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and his attempt to fight a foreclosure on behalf of his clients. In addition to having his appeal thrown out and his ability to draft a complaint trashed in a published federal appellate opinion, he was ordered to show cause as to why he shouldn’t pay double his opponent’s fees, costs and expenses. However, before you start to break out the tiny violins, it might not be the worst idea to take a look at what the appellate court had to say in Jackson v....

On a recent episode of “How to Get Away with Murder,” Professor Keating posits a question to her murder class: Should you ask the client if he committed the crime? Keating suggests that a defense attorney has to “lie” to the jury about a client’s innocence, but that’s not really the case. The lawyer shouldn’t be making a moral judgment; after all, some proportion of clients are bound to have actually done the thing they’re accused of, so that goes with the territory....

In re: Webster, No. 09-11039, involved petitioner’s motion for an order authorizing the district court to consider a successive motion to vacate his federal death sentence. The Fifth Circuit denied the motion, holding that there was no reason to believe that Congress intended the language “guilty of the offense” in 28 U.S.C. section 2255 to mean “eligible for a death sentence.” As the court wrote: “Bruce Webster moves for an order authorizing the district court to consider a successive motion to vacate his federal death sentence under 28 U....

In this brave new world of smartphones and search engines, turning up the heat in nasty divorces and custody disputes has never been easier. However, unfortunately for one celebrity, his strategic (but vexing) legal tactic has landed him in a tangential legal battle against one of the many tech giants that loves a good legal fight that gives them a chance to show they’ll be tough on user privacy. Uber has objected to the third-party subpoena for records served on them in the child-custody battle between Thomas Ravenel and Kathryn Dennis, but curiously, made no mention of user privacy to support their refusal....

It’s only a matter of time before divorce lawyers start thanking the recently passed tax bill for all their new clients. Experts believe that changes to the way alimony is taxed will lead to a spike in divorces. This is likely due to the fact that anyone that was putting off divorce because of the fear of alimony is probably not going to want to wait any longer. The new tax law eliminates the tax deduction for an alimony paying spouse, while also re-characterizes the payment to no longer be considered income for the recipient....