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The James “Whitey” Bulger trial proceeded on Wednesday with opening statements from the prosecution and Bulger’s attorney, J. W. Carney Jr., including two varied accounts of the reputed mobster’s life and criminal career. Bulger’s attorney made a case that the infamous Bostonian could not have been an informant because that would be “the worst thing an Irish Person could consider doing,” reports The New York Times. Despite the early stages of the trial, both sides have managed to get into legal spats about these opening statements....

Thanks to some intrepid journalism by FindLaw blogger (and native Texan) Brett Snider, we’ve obtained a copy of the plaintiffs’ motion to lift the stay on the injunction against Texas’ same-sex marriage ban. That’s a lot of prepositions. Way back in February, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas held the state’s same sex marriage ban unconstitutional. The court stayed enforcement of its injunction, however, because same-sex marriage cases were pending at the Supreme Court and in other federal circuit courts of appeal....

It’s rare for a judge to get so mad that he fines the government after a trial, but U.S. District Judge Alan Gold was so outraged by two prosecutors’ win-at-any-cost tactics that he awarded over $600,000 in attorney’s fees and costs to a defendant acquitted of 141 counts of unlawful prescribing. In 2011, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed the sanctions. This week, the government can breathe a sigh of relief: The Supreme Court has declined to consider the case, The Associated Press reports....

Estate of Ahuva Amergi v. Palestinian Auth., No. 09-13618, concerned an action arising from the murder of Ahuva Amergi, an Israeli citizen who was shot and killed as she drove her car in the Gaza Strip in February of 2002, allegedly by agents of the Palestinian Authority. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, on the ground that the act plaintiffs alleged – a single killing by non-state actors purportedly in the course of an armed conflict – failed to meet the Alien Tort Statute’s high bar....

Defendant’s child pornography conviction is affirmed where: 1) the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it showed the jury three short excerpts from three of the seventeen different videos at issue; 2) the district court did not err in allowing the jury to see the brief excerpt of the non-child pornography video found downloading as the search of defendant’s home occurred; and 3) an employee of the company that designed the file-sharing software used by defendant did not give improper expert testimony....

Conviction of defendant for being a felon in possession of a firearm and sentence as an armed career criminal to 262 months’ imprisonment is affirmed as, although defendant’s crimes are substantively the same and arguably had the same criminal objective, the combination of factors establishes that defendant’s prior felonies were separate and distinct criminal episodes for purposes of the ACCA. Read US v. Carr, No. 08-5037 Appellate Information Argued: December 3, 2009...

During Microsoft’s recent earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella stated that the company would “streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system,” relates The Verge. “This means one operating system that covers all screen sizes.” This isn’t the first mention of a one-OS-fits-all vision – Windows Threshold has been in the rumor pipeline for months, if not years, after all. But, it is certainly the clearest....

You’ve probably heard the buzz about so-called ‘smart contracts.’ These contracts resemble computer code more than typical legal documents, relying on programing to create, facilitate, or execute contracts, with the contracts and conditions stored on a blockchain, or a distributed, relatively unhackable ledger. The technology is considered so promising that PC Magazine recently declared 2017 to be “The Year of Smart Contracts.” But some are questioning whether smart contracts, alone, really are the future....

When does a crime not count as a conviction, yet counts as a prior felony? When the Feds get involved, of course! Omari Elliot was convicted of two counts of robbery, plus a count of brandishing a firearm during the crime. What was his sentence? Life, thanks to a pair of prior felony convictions under the career offender enhancement. One of those convictions, however, was a sealed youthful offender adjudication....

Guest post by Jennifer K. Halford, Esq. Most solo practitioners I know find it is difficult to take a vacation. Hearings or trials get scheduled. A client needs something immediately. Or some other legal “emergency” arises. Those who take a vacation generally work twice as hard the week before to prepare and then twice as much after playing catch up. Plus they worry the entire time they are away that something is going wrong at the office....

You don’t have to lose touch just because you’re telecommuting, traveling to meet a client, or on your way to court. If you’re one of those lawyers whose work takes them out of the office frequently, there are plenty of mobile-based options that allow you to keep on top of projects while on the go. And you don’t have to shell out hundreds of dollars for them either. Mobile-friendly project management apps can help you organize, monitor and track your law firm’s projects, step by step, without costing you a cent – at least not at the start....

Let’s be honest, fun law firm retreats are few and far between. Of the law firms who have retreats at all, many use them as a way to conduct business as usual in a scenic location. Progressive firms, however, are taking advantage of the benefits that authentically “fun” retreats can offer, reports the American Bar Association. With tighter budgets, relaxation activities are the first to be cut at firms. Cutting back on relaxation, however, might not be the best idea....

ProTip: If you plan on breaking the law in the exact same way as one of your favorite rap lyrics describes (or any rap lyric that you are aware of; it doesn’t have to be a favorite), just don’t. And definitely don’t post the lyric to your Facebook page unless you want it to be used against you at your criminal trial. The case of Larry Recio may warrant a few chuckles in the same way as an America’s Funniest Home Videos crotch shots montage....

Proofreading is really important. Especially when it comes to pleadings or other docs that might get filed with the court. Sometimes there’s more than your reputation on the line, and not catching a stupid copy and paste error will have a real impact. Just ask Julian Assange who was recently tipped off about the fact that there are definitely … probably … maybe charges filed against him in the United States, under seal....

The new forms of communication via social media have really taken wing in the courtroom setting. The ABA Law Journal reports that now, not only are judges prohibiting trial tweets, they are moving to codify these prohibitions as well. As reported in The Blog of Legal Times, the Committee on Court Administration and Case Management, a committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, has developed additions to the federal model jury instructions specifically to address the new technology....

James Fields Jr. drove into a crowd in Virginia a year ago, killing one woman and injuring 10 other people protesting a rally of white supremacists. Heather Heyer died that day, and criminal cases proceeded against Fields. Now a federal judge has ruled Charlottesville plaintiffs may proceed with a civil rights lawsuit against dozens of defendants involved in the violence. In Sines v. Kessler, the judge said there is enough evidence that the defendants came to the city to “implement and then celebrate racially-motivated violence against African-Americans, Jews, and their supporters....

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals granted a petition for review this week to a Senegalese mother seeking asylum to protect her minor daughter, a U.S. citizen, from the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). The Court declined to reach the question of whether the petitioner, who opposes the practice of FGM on her daughter, falls within a “particular social group” for purposes of withholding of removal, and remanded the issue for a Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) review....

Over the Labor Day Weekend, The New York Times published a front-page piece on the rise in “wage theft” claims. What should you know if you want to keep your company in compliance and out of court? What Qualifies as Wage Theft? Wage theft encompasses a broad category of activities that revolve around an employee being paid less than she earned. Some examples include: Working off the clock, whether it’s an explicit or implicit policy; Misclassifying workers as independent contractors; Altering timesheets to reflect fewer hours worked; and Moving overtime hours to the next week (or day) to avoid paying overtime....

Google gave, then Google took it away. Beginning with Android 4.3, there was a hidden app permissions management functionality built in to the operating system. This would allow you to approve or deny, permission by permission, app by app. For example, you could deny that shady flashlight app access to your location and personal contacts. All it required was the installation of App Ops, an app that revealed the hidden functionality....

Back in October, we posted about JP Morgan and the DOJ’s tentative settlement, and yesterday, a $13 billion settlement was finalized, and announced, reports The New York Times. As one banking analyst stated to the Los Angeles Times, “[b]efore the crisis, Big Brother was asleep on the couch … Now Big Brother is coming back with a vengeance.” In the largest government settlement, paid by a single company, $13 billion was the magic number to make JPMorgan’s pending civil litigation go away – that is more than half of JPMorgan’s 2012 profits, reports the LA Times....