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Salaries and compensation used to be highly-guarded information. Employees generally didn’t know what their colleagues were making or how much they earned relative to the cubicle next door. But pay secrecy’s days are numbered, given new state and federal laws, NLRB rulings, and the anonymity of the Internet. Salary Transparency and the Law “The legal landscape is decidedly turning towards eliminating pay secrecy,” according to Sarah Moore, a partner at Fisher and Phillips....

Considering the fact that my two-year-old nephew has a smartphone (he likes the talking cat app), it is unsurprising that the vast majority of attorneys are smartphone users. In fact, according to iPhone JD and the 2012 ABA Tech Survey, 89 percent of attorneys use their smartphones for work. Eighty-nine percent. Big freaking deal, right? Even email counts as work. How about this? In one year, lawyers’ use of tablets increased from 14 percent to 33 percent, (91 percent of which are iPads)....

In 2013, news of a scandal broke in Massachusetts that called into question the veracity of over 40,000 criminal drug cases, reports Al Jazeera. Annie Dookhan, a chemist in a state laboratory, was responsible for processing evidence in drug cases, such as testing for cocaine and heroin, and weighing substances. Officials later learned that she had fabricated her credentials, contaminated samples, and dry-labbed – eyeballing evidence rather than actually testing it to determine its contents....

Lawyering in the age of Yelp can pose some tricky issues. No one likes to be reviewed like they were the neighborhood Thai restaurant, especially when the review is negative, or even false. But lawyers with online reviews are more likely to be hired. And while online review sites have been around for more than a decade now, best practices and the law are both evolving. To help keep you up to date, here are the top five recent developments in online lawyer reviews, from the FindLaw archives....

Plaintiffs mysteriously lost twice as many federal cases in 2009 than they had 24 years earlier, according to a new study. Two University of Connecticut law professors said the plaintiffs’ win rate declined about 50 percent from 1985 to 2009. It was a trend the professors cannot explain. “I’m an academic, I don’t like to speculate,” said Peter Siegelman, who co-authored the study with Alexandra Lahav. “Astonishing” The academics said the drop was “astonishing” in their paper, “The Curious Incident of the Falling Win Rate....

Apart from the motivation of having much more independence, going in-house traditionally meant that lawyers could do away with the drudgery of having to track their hours. Working in-house generally meant that lawyers would work to complete and fix problems. Recent chatter in the legal rumor-mill suggests that more and more in-house lawyers have taken to keeping track of their hours voluntarily. Here, we briefly look at some of the reasons that might be behind this trend....

What does this mean? In simplest terms, before Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 129, it was illegal to do what many were already doing: engaging in commerce with “anything but the lawful money of the United States.” Now, corporations won’t be violating the law by handing out their own promotional funny money. Bitcoin, meanwhile, escapes another government’s scrutiny. Wait, Bitcoin was Illegal in California? Though the headlines (and lawmakers) are promoting AB 129 as “legalizing Bitcoin,” it’s questionable whether the statute, repealed by AB 129, ever actually made Bitcoin illegal....

Attorneys filed the first known BlackBerry class action in Quebec Superior Court on Tuesday. Plaintiffs requested permission to represent all Canadian residents affected by this month’s worldwide service outage. Named plaintiff Michael Blackette is unhappy with Research in Motion’s “expression of appreciation” for consumer patience. The company has offered affected subscribers $100 worth of free premium apps and technical support. He wants cash money. Granted, Blackette is only entitled to about $1....

In this digital age, celebrities are anointed every day. Some of these celebrities are famous not because of their entertainment value, but because of their shock value. Criminals and other individuals who have run afoul of the law grace our newspapers every day. Americans also seem to be tirelessly consuming their stories. Famous criminal trials have spun off book deals, movies, and have inspired television shows. This trend poses an ethical question for all attorneys, addressed in an article written by Diane Karpman in the California Bar Journal: should lawyers be allowed to profit off of their client’s life story?...

Thousands of legal professionals rely on FindLaw everyday to look up cases, statutes and legal information. Now all those attorneys, corporate counsels and paralegals have another place to meet up and interact with FindLaw: on Facebook. FindLaw now has a Facebook presence with the newly launched FindLaw for Legal Professionals page. FindLaw’s mission on Facebook is simple – to connect with the legal professionals that use FindLaw everyday. It provides our users with up-to-date news and information that affects the legal profession uniquely, including legal technology news, practice tips and firm management information....

Robert Half Legal is known for a lot of things, including an interesting survey on what lawyers think about our declining wardrobe standards. (Hint: Stuffy lawyers want to dress like they’re stuffy.) But this survey might be even more interesting, at least for in-house counselors: It talks about compensation forecasts for 2015. The Robert Half Legal 2015 Salary Guide was just released earlier this month (H/T to Bloomberg) and it has nothing but good news all around....

The technology world is full of hackers and they’re not all identity thieves, anti-adultery activists, or Chinese saboteurs. Instead, many are so-called “white hat” hackers, computer security experts who specialize in finding flaws in others’ systems. These white hat hackers are an important, respected part of the computer security ecosystem. Which is what makes a recent dispute between computer security companies so surprising. FireEye is a security firm that reports on flaws in Adobe, Apple, and Google, and provides its own malware protection products....

If your firm’s revenue growth has been stagnant or even declined, you’re not alone. Law firms experienced a sizable drop in revenue per partner last year, according to National Law Journal’s annual ‘Survey of Law Firm Economics.’ On average, revenue per partner dropped 4.7 percent in 2015, the biggest decline ever identified by the survey. What could be behind the dip? The report surveyed 574 firms and found that average revenue per partner was $468,511 in 2015, down from $491,729 in 2014, or a loss of $23,218....

Old and busted: drunken driving. New hotness? Drugged driving. The latest survey conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that incidents of driving under the influence of alcohol are down by a third since 2007. That’s good news for road safety, but there’s some bad news too: 25 percent of drivers tested positive for marijuana or another drug that could impair their ability to operate a vehicle. Indeed, among weekend nighttime drivers, the number who had pot in their systems jumped by 50 percent between 2007 and 2014, NHTSA found....

It’s hard to report this story with a straight face. I mean, even the monkey was smiling. If you haven’t seen them before, the pictures are definitely worth seeing. The macaque, who snapped his own selfies, has a great simian smile. According to a federal judge, however, the animal doesn’t have a copyright to the photos. It’s not a joke, although more than a few lawyers say it is. Animal Copyrights?...

Almost all lawyers use social media but few know how it helps their practice, according to a new survey. Attorney at Work, reporting results of its third annual social media marketing survey, said that 96 percent of the respondents regularly use social media. But barely seven percent believe social media is directly responsible for bringing in new clients. And while more lawyers are using sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, they don’t really know whether social media marketing is more reality or hype....

Roger Shuler, the man behind the Legal Schnauzer blog which broke the rumors about Eleventh Circuit Judge William Pryor’s alleged gay porn past, has been sitting in a jail cell for the past few weeks for violating a court order, one which many are arguing is an unconstitutional restraint on speech. Shuler wrote a series of posts about an alleged affair between a local Republican political figure Robert Riley Jr. (the son of former two-term Alabama Gov....

Recent news of two men arrested at a Starbucks made national headlines due to the racial implications of the incident. The men were waiting for another person whom they were supposed to meet there, when the Starbucks manager told them to buy something or leave. When the men didn’t leave, police were called, and the men were arrested for trespassing. Video of that arrest went viral. In an interesting turn of events, the two men have settled their lawsuit against the city and coffee giant for a mere $1 each from the city....

As the new Samsung Galaxy S4 trickles into the hands of reviewers and consumers, one feature that many were anxiously awaiting is conspicuously absent: the previously announced and now-delayed Samsung Knox (as in Fort Knox), reports The New York Times. BlackBerry’s survival to date is almost certainly due to its industry-leading security features. IT departments, lawyers and all others with a security fetish love the phone for that exact reason. Features like remote wipe for when you leave your BlackBerry at Starbucks (or when that employee defects to a rival company) mean that your sensitive client data won’t end up online....

The new SpaceX project, Heavy, which was recently successfully tested, is proof positive that Elon Musk’s revolutionary company is making huge strides for the space industry. Notably, SpaceX has been able to do what NASA never could, cut costs. Where the vendors for NASA never were pressured to reduce costs due to the lack of alternatives, SpaceX has turned to in house manufacturing where vendors couldn’t meet their cost demands. Given the legal industry’s reluctance to cut costs, perhaps there may be a lesson law firms can learn from SpaceX....