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The Maryland Attorney General’s office will challenge a federal court opinion relaxing Maryland gun control laws in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling altered the standard for issuing gun permits and expanded the scope of where a permit holder may carry a handgun, reports The Baltimore Sun. Prior to the ruling, the state used the “may issue” standard when granting Maryland gun-carry permits. Permit applicants were required to prove that they weren’t dangerous felons or addicts, and that they had a “good and substantial reason” for carrying a gun....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Facebook now boasts more than 800 million active users, with 350 million gaining access from mobile devices. Roughly 70 percent of Facebook users are located outside of the United States. Every month about 30 billion content links are shared on Facebook. Remarkably, Facebook users install 20 million apps every day. Almost half of 18-34 year-old users check Facebook when they wake up, with more than a quarter of users doing so before they even leave the bed....

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld summary judgment in favor of a Texas city this week, finding that a police officer’s use of deadly force against an armed, suicidal teenager did not amount to excessive force. Officer W.M. Green was on patrol nearby, when he received a dispatch that a man had stabbed himself and needed medical attention. (The dispatcher mistakenly informed Green that Ruddy had already stabbed himself and the knife was still lodged in his abdomen....

Patent trolls. Patent Assertion Entities. Non-Practicing Entities. Expletives. Whatever you call ‘em, the holding companies that produce nothing for this country, yet buy patent assets and assert the associated rights, are a much-lamented plague on this nation’s economy, cost intellectual property-heavy industries billions in patent litigation fees, and are an absolute boon for the lawyers. (Hint: no one cares about the lawyers, this writer included.) The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) has just barely begun to take effect, and many of its provisions were aimed at the patent troll issue....

How do arbitration costs compare to litigation costs? One corporation crunched the numbers and got back some interesting data. Arbitration takes more time and money, according to one study by a corporation looking at whether its arbitration program was cheaper than litigation. But how important are those results to a solo attorney or small firm’s decision about arbitration versus litigation? All information is useful if you know how to interpret it....

While the legal profession clearly is not recession-proof, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill litigation has kept lawyers busy. Lawyers are arguing civil liability, criminal liability, continuances, deposition appearances. The list just keeps going. Last week, at least one of the many questions in the BP litigation was resolved. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that BP is covered by a Transocean insurance policy for up to $750 million in oil spill damages, Bloomberg reports....

According to a web security researcher, Twitter has a “functional bug” that effectively retains the direct messages (aka DMs) that users send, even after a user deletes those messages, or even their whole account. The so-called bug has been raising some rather loud criticism of the platform, which at one point allowed users to effectively “unsend” direct messages by deleting them, though that feature has since been removed. Twitter has not provided any details, but did state that it was looking into this issue....

Behind every great trial attorney is experienced, hard-working support staff. Though the paralegals and secretaries of the industry don’t share the same recognition as a Cochran and a Baez, without a staff that organizes the offices, conducts research, drafts briefs, and handles the day-to-day tasks, the legal eagles would never leave the nest. Her name? Casey Anthony. The Law No, we’re not talking about her criminal trial here. We’re talking about the EEOC’s recent guidelines on considering a candidate’s criminal past when making employment decisions....

When it comes to making litigation decisions, lawyers usually depend on their experience, research, and gut instincts, rather than hard data. That’s slowly changing, however, as more firms begin to embrace the use of data analytics when deciding how to pursue litigation. Of course, startups and the media have been calling data analytics the future of the legal profession for years now. While data analytics are becoming more common, they still have a long way to go to meet their full potential....

Appellate courts will soon lose their authority to create precedent in prison strip search cases; the Supreme Court heard arguments in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington this week, and will decide the constitutionality of minor offense strip searches. This week, perhaps engaging in a last hurrah, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals released what could be its final opinion in the matter. Oscar and Chandra Jimenez operated a bar in Wood County, Texas....

If you have GMail, you have a Google Plus account and if you haven’t taken the time to check it out, it’s probably easily searchable on the Internet. Have we got your attention yet? Good. This one’s important. Most GMail users set up Google Plus when it debuted and then promptly forgot about it. But those profiles haven’t disappeared. Since the social network is owned and controlled by the search giant, your Google Plus profile and activity could be part of any name searches potential clients or employers do....

It’s hard to unlock a smartphone without the password and Google apparently won’t help the FBI figure it out. Earlier this year, the FBI served Google with a search warrant asking them to unlock a smartphone that belonged to a suspect. But Google refused to acquiesce to the request although they won’t say why, reports The Wall Street Journal. That specific case has been resolved but the larger issue of whether smartphone companies must provide passwords is still up in the air....

Another new year, another fresh intellectual property lawsuit to start things off. Warner Bros. and the creator and license holder of HDCP (Hi-Definition Copyright Protection) software, Digitial Content Protection, LLC, have jointly sued Chinese outfit Legendsky (dba HDFury) over allegations that at least one of its devices strips content of its digital copyright protection, rendering it viewable on devices not originally intended by the studios. The guy who ran the HD Fury website seemed not to have any qualms at all about the “HD Fury Integral” device, marketing it as liberation from “HDCP errors”....

For three decades, Geoffrey Chism worked with Tri-State Construction, a construction company in the Pacific Northwest, first as outside counsel, then general counsel and sole in-house attorney. In that role, Chism renegotiated his salary and bonus agreements, then sued Tri-State a few years later for failing to honor them. After a month-long jury trial, Chism won $1.5 million. But the judge, finding “numerous misrepresentations and omissions” in Chism’s negotiations with Tri-State, ordered him to disgorge $1....

A law firm in New Jersey is banking on intern rights as the burgeoning new area of employment law. In fact, attorneys Lorin Schneider and Yonatan Rubin are so certain that intern rights will take off that they have devoted their entire firm – Schneider & Rubin LLC – to representing interns exclusively, reports NJBIZ. The two partners say they got the idea to start the intern rights law firm as they looked around job sites like Craigslist and college job fairs and saw so many employers still offering unpaid internships and other illegal positions, reports NJBIZ....

Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a temporary injunction barring the Obama administration from enforcing its contraceptive mandate against the Colorado- and Maryland-based Little Sisters of the Poor and Illinois-based Christian Brothers Services. The mandate, which requires many employers to provide health insurance coverage for birth control or face penalties, has had confusing implications for non-profit groups that are merely affiliated with religion. To get a better grasp of Justice Sotomayor’s injunction, one needs to understand how the Affordable Care Act’s exemption works....

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently ruled that the state’s wiretap statute permits the interception of cell phone calls and text messages – even though neither form of communication is mentioned in the Massachusetts wiretap statute. The court’s decision is girded by legislative intent and clings to inference, opting for an “it’s close enough to federal law” line of reasoning. Due to a lack of plain statutory language on cell phones and text messages, they argued the evidence should be suppressed – but their argument failed....

If you can’t wait to get to the office, you probably work at a great law firm. If you feel like your co-workers are trusted friends, you probably work at a great law firm. If you don’t care about how much money you’re making, you probably work at a great law firm. Whether you are an employee or an employer, there are some sure signs that you work at a great law firm....

While the internet provides endless entertainment and news, it’s also a breeding ground for copyright infringement (which means it’s potentially a rather ripe legal industry). Media companies and websites are under constant deadline pressures as the online news cycle never really ends. That means producing a high volume of content. Unfortunately, sometimes editorial judgment is lacking and unlicensed photographs get published. When that happens, the photographer may have a meritorious claim of copyright infringement....

For in-house counsel to be successful in tech, just like in any other industry, it requires just the right combination of skill and luck. And while luck may be fickle and unpredictable, skills are learnable. If you hope to succeed in tech as an in-house attorney, the following three skills are among the most important to continually be working on: Tech companies, like technology itself, change very rapidly. Startups and projects at existing tech giants can often go from unknown to world-wide-web fame overnight....