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The ACLU has answered the question of what to do in police encounters with the now-familiar, “There’s an app for that.” The new Android app, called Police Tape, was put out by the New Jersey chapter of the ACLU and it has a lot of value for everyday citizens. It provides know-your-rights information for police interactions, including traffic and Terry stops, police at your home, and arrest. The app also responds to another need: how to record an interaction with an officer if the person who is stopped suspects something is going wrong....

Don’t you just hate it when the boss-man at a company has been sexually harassing employees for so long that no one can pinpoint when the harassment started, and everyone starts bickering about whether or not the company’s wrongful employment practices policy covers his saucy antics? It’s the worst. But if you’re a lawyer for either the boss-man’s company or the insurance company, that bickering means billables because the case is unlikely to be resolved in summary judgment....

If you haven’t noticed, unless you are in a Third-World library without internet access, nobody really does legal research using books anymore. So do lawyers really need those old law books? And what about those skills that came with learning how to research with books? Is there a place for old school lawyering? “Wait, wait,” you may be saying. This is all happening too fast. One question at a time, please....

Back in law school, we did a cursory class or two – by which I mean, we spent a day or two of class – on using paper research materials. You know the ones: federal reporters, state reporters, and those West key reporter things. These days, all those books are relegated to propping up the short leg of your desk or appearing as props on lawyer TV shows (why would someone have a single copy of the U....

It just got a little easier for in-house and transactional attorneys to know if their legal documents meet current standards. Thomson Reuters’s Drafting Assistant, the only end-to-end transactional drafting software solution in the world, just added a new “locate precedent” feature that allows you to compare your draft to similar documents, one clause at a time. (Disclosure: Thomson Reuters is FindLaw’s parent company.) That means greater confidence, quicker drafting, and many fewer errors sneaking through....

When it comes to line spacing, Judge Victor Marrero does not play around. The SDNY judge fined the boutique litigation firm of Susman Godfrey $1,048.09 last week for breaking with his court’s line space rule. The firm’s crime? Using 24-point spacing, instead of the court’s required double spacing. If you have kids – or are young enough to have been a kid in the PC era – you’ve probably seen students switch their font size from 12-point to 14, or expand Word’s margins a quarter of an inch, so that their report on the causes of the Civil War will finally reach the four pages the teacher requires....

If you do any type of business in China, trademarks should be on your mind. Chinese trademark protection can actually afford companies some security when doing business abroad. And, even companies that only manufacture in China should consider registering their trademarks. The first step to trademark protection is simple. Register your trademark. China is a first-to-register country. Your trademark might be a globally well-known brand, but unless you file it first your company’s reputation means very little to an enforcing Chinese court....

Georgia Pac. Consumer Prod., LP. v. Von Drehle Corp., 09-1942, involved a plaintiff’s suit against one of its competitors for violation of various federal and state laws, for marketing and selling to distributors an inferior paper toweling specifically manufactured by defendant for use in plaintiff’s trademarked paper towel dispensers. The court held that plaintiff has proffered sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to find, by a preponderance of the evidence, in favor of plaintiff with respect to each element of plaintiff’s contributory trademark infringement and unfair competition claims under the Lanham Act and its unfair competition claim under North Carolina common law....

Remember 1L year, when you told everyone you were seriously considering a public interest career? Or when you started at your firm, thinking you would take on plenty of pro bono on the side? Well, you don’t have to give up the “good” part of practicing when you go in-house. Plenty of corporate legal departments have longstanding pro bono programs. If yours doesn’t, you can make it yourself, even if your department is small and under resourced....

In a creditor’s appeal from the district court’s order affirming an order of the bankruptcy court that set aside an order directing the Texas Real Estate Commission (TREC) to pay the creditor $100,000 from the Texas Real Estate Recovery Trust Account, the order is affirmed where the bankruptcy court did not abuse its discretion by setting aside the default order directing payment because the TREC could reasonably have expected a hearing setting on the motion, as there was no “negative notice”....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. Question: How free is the internet? Answer: Less than free in certain countries. Further answer: And becoming even less free in other countries – witness Vietnam, discussed briefly below. At the start of this month, a law went into effect in Vietnam that mandates removal of online content considered offensive to the Vietnamese government....

Around this time seven years ago, we were sitting in Louisiana and hoping that Hurricane Katrina would pass our beloved Bayou State without wreaking havoc. Once again, we’re spending the final days of August playing a wait and see game with a hurricane heading straight for the Gulf Coast. Monday afternoon, Isaac’s wind speed increased to 70 mph, just 4 mph short of a hurricane, NBCNews.com reports. The National Hurricane Center is predicting that Isaac will reach Category 2 status with 100 mph winds late Tuesday night or early Wednesday....

Sending back a wrongful death case, a federal appeals court said a trial judge erroneously ruled on a summary judgment issue that had not been raised in the case. The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals said neither party had argued whether the StudentCity tour company caused the accident that took the life of 18-year-old Lisa Tam Chung. Borrowing a quote from Shakespeare, Judge Bruce M. Selya said it was clear that causation was never before the court....

The U.S. Justice Department recently sent a letter to state and local courts warning them about constitutional concerns prompted by overly burdensome fees placed on poor and indigent defendants. The correspondence took the form of a “dear colleague letter” and has been used to “push the boundaries of civil rights law,” at least according to The New York Times. Such “Dear Colleague” letters have been used as official correspondences sent by Congress to lower federal agencies....

Whether aspiring to be Atticus Finch or Gloria Allred, law students can get an early shot at the big time in First Circuit Court of Appeals. The First Circuit has adopted amendments to Local Rule 46.0(f), broadening the scope of law student representation. Under the expanded rule, a law student may represent the federal government or a federal agency, and a law graduate may represent clients under certain circumstances while waiting to sit for the bar for the first time or waiting for bar examination results....

The Juliana v. United States matter was heard by a three judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this week. And while some might expect that the most liberal circuit in the nation would have been throwing softballs to plaintiffs’ attorney, the tenor of the questioning was equally harsh on both sides. Notably, prior to the appeal, the Ninth Circuit issued a stay in the matter, pending their review....

The Internet’s attention span is short, but its memory is long. And if you’ve done something embarrassing, you’ll be reminded every time you Google yourself. Maybe you sent out a tasteless tweet, wrote a horrible college op-ed, or casually pepper sprayed a group of college students. Now Google won’t let you forget it. What can one do? In France, they have a “right to be forgotten,” the ability to petition Google and other search engines to remove web pages from search results....

A Senate panel has voted to revise laws that require search warrants for email accounts and prohibit the sharing of movie-viewing data, which would clear the way for Netflix to integrate with Facebook. Interestingly, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s vote to revise the two laws would actually increase electronic privacy protections with respect to one issue, while decreasing protections with the other. With the revised law, consumers would be able to give consent in advance to the disclosure of their viewing histories, making it unnecessary for companies to receive consent for each individual movie, reports MediaPost....

Police officers executed a warrant to search Travis Hunter Blank’s home after he emailed a video clip depicting child pornography, triggering an investigation. While the cops poked around the house, Blank voluntarily spoke with Detective Jeff Rich. Blank was refreshingly forthcoming in their conversation. He told Rich that he sent the clip and that he had viewed child pornography for the last 10 years. He completed a written statement admitting that he had viewed 1,000 pictures....

Clients often want to be heard: by their lawyers, by the courts, by the public. Some take to the media to get their side of a story aired. Letting clients speak directly with the media, however, can have severe risks, especially when a client is unpredictable, unprepared, or unsympathetic. Perhaps you’ve heard the story about the recent shooting death of Kate Steinle. Ms. Steinle was allegedly shot at random by Francisco Sanchez, though that “allegedly” is getting much weaker after Sanchez gave a jailhouse interview confessing to the crime and asking to be put to death....